ColdFusion Studio 4.5

Rating:
Summary: cold fusion
Review: data connectivity,web page designing,hosting,advantages,programmin

Rating:
Summary: Nice editor, good product to develop CF apps. locally
Review: [I am assuming that readers are somewhat familiar with ColdFusion]

When ColdFusion first came out as a product, it did not have any editor software so developers where using notepad or anything else to write ColdFusion pages. The Allaire bought Homesite which was at a time a shareware text-based HTML editing tools and released Studio which is basically an modified version of Homesite to which additional support for COldFusion has been added.

Studio is mostly a text-based editor. The idea is that you work with tags but number of features are available to help you so that even if you are not fluent in HTML or CFML developing applications is quite easy. This is the part of the product I like the most. I find a gain a lot of time working with code, yet I can still working with code. It is good to keep in mind that Homesite has has support for the ColdFusion Markup Language (making it a cheaper alternative to consider). ColdFUsion Studio is also fully extensible and customizable. YOu can for instance add support for the tag you create so that the same type of dialog box appear where you only need to fill the tag attribute.

Recently, some embryonic WYSIWYG features have been added but they are not very useful nor very good in my opinion. If you want to use a WYSIWIG editor or a wizard approach, go for dreamweaver (who ships with Homesite) and Ultradev. ColdFusion studio is designed to deal with the code.

Others features of Studio (which is not present with Homesite) are additional support for COldFusion application remote development. Basically you can connect to a remote server either using FTP or using ColdFusion Remote Development System (RDS). ColdFusion RDS lets you browse the file system (or the portion of it you are entitle to access) of the remote server not just the FTP root. THis is truly useful, for instance when working with COldFusion Custom Tags. Also you can access the datasource on the server (those you are entitled to access anyway) and performs queries, build queries with the visual query builder (something akin to MS Query) and see the data type of each column in a table. This is not quite good enough to do hard-core development work but comes handly esp. when using databases for which few remote development tools exists.

The real question is: is ColdFusion worth so much money when the CFML language support is built into HomeSite. The answer depends on your work environment. If you are working on a remote server on which you have no administrative access, you won't be able to use any RDS-related features and therefore Homesite gives you mostly the same. Except, that (and this is the true argument to get studio), Studio also ships with a one user license of the COldFusion Application Server. This means that by downloading a free webserver, you can simulate the set-up of a CF web server on your own machine and test applications locally without access to a COldFusion server or even without internet connection.