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ColdFusion was about the only language (in my experience - sure there's others) that you needed to pay for the runtime for your code (in a production environment; development version was free; The "Express" version went away around 2001 or so). Then along come Railo and Open BlueDragon, and there were open source alternatives. The "language" itself is pretty basic (most developers get by using just 5 tags), but the power of it comes when you use the various feature tags that are more akin to APIs (cfchart, cfpdf, cfsearch, etc). Railo and OpenBD of course implement all these tags. Whereas Oracle doesn't "sell" Java, Adobe sells ColdFusion - if Oracle wins, Adobe has 100% motivation to eliminate their competition. (Should also point out that OpenBD's lineage comes from New Atlanta, which sells commercial version of Blue Dragon - MySpace was built on this.)

Actually, I think they use this awful backend. Don't blame ColdFusion and Adobe because MySpace skimped on the $$$...

On another note, Micrososft is working with them very closely to convert their server farm from Cold Fusion to ASP.Net 2.0.

This is an interesting one. MySpace is written in ColdFusion but actually runs on the .NET version of BlueDragon. BlueDragon is a .NET (or Java) application that runs ColdFusion code as an alternative to Adobe's ColdFusion server.

So what we have currently is a situation where:
1. Adobe can't really claim that MySpace is running ColdFusion because it's running in .NET on a competitor's server not theirs and
2. Microsoft isn't really crowing about MySpace running .NET because it's written in a competitor's language. Not surprising that they're 'working closely' to fix that!

They actually use Blue Dragon http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/
With that said, people who blame site errors on actual cold fusion are idiots. It's not CF that is the problem, it is bad CF code from bad developers. That would be like saying "this application sucks. It was written in C++ on UNIX. That means that C++ and UNIX suck." I've heard that myspace is migrating their servers from an old CF platform to CFMX and CFMX7. That might be an issue. And yes, CF has become just an abstraction layer to JAVA. You can still code in the basic CF tag lanugage but you can also run java code right from the CFM pages.

There's always Blue Dragon...

Dude, that's unfair to PHP developers everywhere...

MySpace runs CFML, and always has. Specifically, today they runs their CFML application code on Blue Dragon, rather than ColdFusion for the increased scalability and compatibility with a .NET stack. Their leaders spoke at CFUnited a few weeks ago.

That's right, if that was the case you'd be much more familiar with ColdFusion and drop both PHP and ASP.NET as I've used them both more than I wish I had before CF.

It is a great combination of corporation / developer community that is growing and already has a lot of features far past PHP and ASP. And a lot of huge companies use it (ie. Bank of America) , including the government (yes, the government uses it more than ASP or PHP).

And...there are servers that run on top of both java and .NET to leverage either as your company sees fit with 2 different companies making servers (CF is not stuck to Macromedia only for server software and therefore more resiliant than ASP). Oh yea, and did I mention that creating a webservice is as easy as change a function type from "public" "private" or "package" to "remote". Now that is ease of development. Something that blends language design, compatibility, and power.

Spend some time on it...
http://macromedia.com/software/coldfusion/?promoid =BINO (main CF provider)
http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/inde x.cfm (Offers CF on both Java and .NET, with a free server as well)
And I would argue with anyone who claims that both of these companies are not incredibly responsive to developers.

Back in 2001, a friend of mine undertook replicating Coldfusion tags in Java. He had a good start, but due to a PHB, we were instructed to NOT use tag libraries in the J2EE product we were developing.

Thankfully that decision was overturned 8 months later, but by then an Open Source CFML engine was well underway and Struts, the JSTL & their like were proving their worth.

That Open Source CFML engine later became New Atlanta Software's BlueDragon.

They have 4 versions:

Server - free even for produciton, but not for redistribution
JX which is equivalant to Macromedia's Pro version.
J2EE ~ MM J2EE
and .NET, which co-operates with .NET components the way the J2EE version co-operates with pure Java components.

However, their version does not 100% match Macromedia's feature for feature, but the majority of the core functionality is there and they're constantly adding to their offerings. And the .NET version is something MM most likely won't attempt.

So it's possible and they can't stop it. There's even yet another CFML engine out there. I just don't know of anyone using it.

Too expensive? If a mere $1200 is going to kill the project, then you have other more significant problems than just the cost of CF Standard.

Also there are other options, for example New Atlanta's Blue Dragon (http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/ind ex.cfm) is a CFMX compatible server, the basic server is free.

Getting to a VAR Agreement with NewAtlanta, they licence you BlueDragon J2EE server for 20% of your list product price.

So if you are selling your product/development for $5000 you can have a BlueDragon J2EE server for $1000, develop in cfml at the speed of light and deploy using EAR/WAR.

Also, you can go for the free version [ bottom of the page ] non J2EE server.

There are also more companies making cfml engines.

Getting to a VAR Agreement with NewAtlanta, they licence you BlueDragon J2EE server for 20% of your list product price.

So if you are selling your product/development for $5000 you can have a BlueDragon J2EE server for $1000, develop in cfml at the speed of light and deploy using EAR/WAR.

Also, you can go for the free version [ bottom of the page ] non J2EE server.

There are also more companies making cfml engines.

Blue Dragon http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/inde x.cfm

From my understanding is working on a free implementation of CF

Right now, CFML is the only language that will run on either a Java Server or the .NET framework

Sure, there are better cheaper tag-based languages out there, but CFML is still one of the easiest languages I've ever come across. If anything, it's too easy, that's why there is so much disdain for it, in many ways, it's so easy -- it doesn't feel like a real computer language.

Jacksonyee said
"If Zope, ColdFusion, or J2EE had more availability or less cost, then I would try those as well"

First, ColdFusion is a free download that reverts to a single IP (developer version) in 30 days. Most people are on shared hosts and there isn't much difference between a CF hosted site and a PHP one.

Looking to write object oriented CF MX code try the free Mach-II (in beta) here.

If you want totally free then use NewAtlanta's BlueDragon server here . Granted it's a generation behind CF MX but I know a fellow who put together a Linux + MySQL + BlueDragon site on an AMD box for under $500 with the only cost being the hardware.

The dirty little secret about PHP as compared to CF, JSP or ASP is that it's not scalable. IMHO sometimes by paying a little you get a lot.

Man Holmes

The web browser has set back application development 20 years.

So what you are saying is that application development on a browser is like COBOL, FORTRAN, and Assembly?

We're in an age when even the smallest hardware store can buy a highly reliable Linux server and have MySQL and Apache running on it for under $500. All you need then is the software that'll keep your stock inventory, and the equipment to network your existing -- probably low spec -- PCs up, and off you go.

Absolutely Right. I recently just built an entire POS(Point of Sale) system for a mechanic. All I did was add a single server (w/ Linux, MySQL, and BlueDragon) added a network card to each machine he already had and now he has a reliable network aware application. Before, he had an old system that could only be run on a single computer. Now his mechanics can be updating maintenance records in the garage while his receptionist is billing customers in the office.

But web apps are a freakin headache for support, BECAUSE of their ability to run on anything.

If you stick to web standards (Not IE Standards), you can miminmize this. Admittedly, it also helps if you can make sure that everyone is using a modern browser. (Mozilla 1.0+, IE 5.5+, Netscape 6.0+)

Compiled programs are still what run mission critical software. They're faster and more reliable.

Compiled programs are faster... Yes. That is the biggest benefit. However, how much speed do you need? My POS system I mentioned above renders most pages in under one-half of a second, Only a few of the reports take a little longer. It is actually faster than the old compiled POS system he replaced. Admittedly, the old system had more data than it could handle, but with the new system I told him when there is more customer data than it can handle we could both retire.

As for reliablity, if your client machine crashes while running a compiled application it is possible to lose data. A web browser is stateless, (even though we use tricks to retain the current state) if a client machine crashes, the chance of losing data is minimal.

In the corporate world, because of problems with the limitations of browser based interfaces and the speed of computers companies are making a big push back in the direction of thick client applications

I disagree, one of the reasons why we are going in the direction of thin clients is that you only need to back-up and provide critical support for the server. It is cheapest to provide this support for the fewest number of computers necessary. The problem with thick-client is installing software updates to the client side and a concept experienced programmers refer to as DLL-Hell.

Why mess with Bluedragon when its got known bugs such as not escaping quotes in queries (PDF File), etc.? As for me, I'd rather install CFMX J2EE on Tomcat. Actually, I do have CFMX running on FreeBSD now, and it works pretty well other than me still trying to get it to run as a non-root user.

- Brandon

Actually, I have used Cold Fusion for some major in-house applications and it works very well. CFML is easy to learn and quick to develop. (especially if you know HTML well.) Coldfusion integrates well with all of the major databases. It is also easy to add javascript to the code (for the few things that CFML doesn't do) and there is a product called Blue Dragon that integrates CFML with JSP at half the cost of Macromedia's Coldfusion.

We use Tomcat/Apache/J2EE in a production environment here with Autonomy's Portal in a Box. We've found that it performs much better than a Win32 install with the same hardware and specs. Tomcat, however, is much harder to configure and get working with proprietary software than say New Atlanta's ServletExec, which I found is much easier to configure and install. But once it get's going, I think Tomcat is as rock solid a server engine as any other.

• New Atlanta ServletExec 3.0 - I've seen this one used succesfully before, and it was even used for a while with Javalobby.org as a plugin for Apache. It should be platform independant, but it is dependant upon you using a supported webserver (Apache, iPlanet, IIS, etc).
• Orion Server - This is a 100% Java Webserver with built-in support for XML/XSLT/WAP/etc. It also fully supports servlets (of course) as well as JSPs and EJBs. This is the product currently used by Javalobby. Overall, I think that it's a great solution. The performance of this solution is excellent.

First of all, I recommend the O'Reilly Servlet book.

Second, pick your servlet engine carefully. I saw the reference to some hello world tests in a previous post. The servlet tests look like they were run on Apache's servlet engine. Too bad its dog slow (last I read about it that is ~6 months ago--I'm sure that they will catch up). We used Servlet Exec, and it works well. Also, be careful to not to let yourself be misled by micro benchmarks.

Third, consider your needs. In our servlets we were able to take advantage of object caching, sophisticated object to relational mapping tools and CORBA connectivity to back end services. There's a very nice java servlet framework called Webmacro, which is free (as in software not beer). I also see potential in JSP's, although I have no direct experience with them.

I also saw some comments about Java being slow. Yes, that's true. However I would venture to guess that its fast enough for all but the most demanding applications. Comments from another post said that you'll require serious hardware to do servlets. No doubt. However, computers are getting faster and so are Java VM's. I'm sure that Java will be fast enough for those demanding applications in the next couple of years, and my opinion is that if you want to be ready to slide down that slippery slope (like Chevy Chase in Christmas vacation) when its slick enough, then there's no better time to start greasing up with the right lubricant and getting the experience than now.

In short, we've had good luck with servlets. Developement has been quick (most of the development speed gained in Java is cut out from debugging when compared to c/c++ I can't compare it to perl though). The web sites have performed well. Personally, I believe that developer time is more valuable than CPU time, so I would recommend (IMHO) spending the extra dollars on hardware, and saving on the developement and maintenence.

Good Luck