ColdFusion Server 4.5 Professional Upgrade

Rating:
Summary: A flexible platform, but has its time passed?
Review: It is difficult to come up with a single star rating or a review for a product like Allaire Cold Fusion. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the usefulness of a development environment is very much a question of personal taste and individual need.

When Cold Fusion first appeared, it was something of a revelation for Web developers like me. Back in the Dark Ages of the Web, I hacked Perl scripts to access flat file databases for numerous e-commerce and other applications. I like Perl, but it wasn't always a great way of doing things, and there were always issues around performance and flexibility.

I came across Cold Fusion in 1997, and to put it simply, things got a lot easier. After learning a bit of SQL and database design in MS Access, I could build some interesting things. And I think that has been the experience of a lot of developers, most of whom I know are more comfortable with code than I am. CF is a called a rapid application development environment, and is one product that has always lived up to the term.

However, my feeling today is that CF may have been superseded by other platforms, specifically Java Server Pages (JSP) and, to an even greater extent, PHP, with its incredible ease of use, flexibility, portability. Cold Fusion hasn't become less of a product, but its time may have passed.