Feelin' LUNY: ColdFusion Talk at Linux Meeting

 
Dec 13, 1999
On Tuesday, October 22nd, the New York Linux users group (a.k.a. LUNY) reached out to embrace one of the most robust of the Web's application languages, ColdFusion, by inviting Michael Dinowitz of House of Fusion, Inc. to address their monthly meeting. The Linux community's efforts to expand the adoption of Linux as a major alternative to Bill Gates' operating system monopoly means working with existing applications and established developers to make sure that they can work as well or better in the Linux environment as elsewhere. Mr. Dinowitz is a leading expert on ColdFusion and its related programs. He is currently running ColdFusion in a Linux test-environment and reported on its ease of use on this new operating system.

LUNY president Gary McKesie opened the meeting by welcoming representatives of the sponsors of the meeting, Sybase (who was host for the evening in their aerie on the 80th+ floor of the World Trade Center), NYSIA (stalwart supporters of the free software/open source industry) and Infohouse, as well as WatchIT, which videotaped the meeting for the latest in their video series.

There were some technical difficulties with the temporary set-up used to display ColdFusion in the live Linux laptop made available to Mr. Dinowitz, including an incomplete download of the program's documentation, which hampered the presentation a bit, but it was clear that Linux can and does support the program.

Mr. Dinowitz started his comments with a brief synopsis of his impressive background in ColdFusion and made an announcement acknowledging that House of Fusion, Inc. has now come under ICES/CoreActive's sheltering wing. A series of books on ColdFusion are also under development in a joint project between Fusion Authority and JM Publishers, Inc., with the first, on ColdFusion functions.

He then gave some background on Allaire, the publisher of ColdFusion, and the interaction of Allaire's various products. ColdFusion is "open code;" when combined with Sybase's SQLAnywhere, web developers have a truly huge toolbox to work from.

Michael noted that lots of people have been waiting for Linux to develop into the full-fledged operating system it is now becoming, waiting for the opportunity to "dump Microsoft." We were all attending this meeting to share information on how to use the Linux operating system and, in particular, how to put it to use with ColdFusion.

ColdFusion now runs on Windows, Solaris, HP and Linux, transferring with only minimal modifications in the installation. Allaire is now refining the connections to Linux/Red Hat, and will proceed to target Caldera next before moving on to other versions of Linux.

Michael pointed out that, regrettably, Allaire's site building product, ColdFusion Studio, is not yet ready for Linux. However, even Notepad can be used to develop a respectable site.

When questioned about backward compatibility of versions, with ColdFusion 4.5 about to be released and 5.0 on the near horizon, Michael noted that Allaire's back ends are compatible all the way back to the first version.

ColdFusion is an application server, he stressed: Go anywhere, get information, bring it back and use it. Its HTML-friendly language is key. Using JRun with ColdFusion gives it full Java access. While its client-side Java is not as well developed, its server-side capability is great.

One problem with all such programs is "featuritis," or feature-overload. ColdFusion is not pre-loaded; just bring in any pre-written module as needed. And there are literally libraries full of ColdFusion modules and Java scripts out there, ready to be tapped, on Allaire's home site and other developers' venues. No need to re-invent the wheel. Developers can pick up any module and plug it in; they are not licensed or registered by Allaire, although they are sometimes licensed by the originating developer.

ColdFusion also self-checks for tag completion, and its syntax checker will check for all sorts of problems, maximizing usage.

Small/personal sites can be build very quickly using ColdFusion over ASP. "ColdFusion was written for people to do stuff," Michael stressed. ASP, which is based on Visual products, was written for programmers. Users can pick up ColdFusion and use it the first day. It has tremendous capability for advanced functions, but it was not built specifically for programmers. At the other end of the spectrum, large sites can be as complex as necessary, while running code tight enough to scale as large as necessary.

Michael ended the demonstration with, "Learn ? grow ? get out there and DO stuff!" Good advice.


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