Basic Coldfusion Questions - for anybody.

kc

Hi,

A friend of mine would like someone to fill this out for her college course. Much obliged for any interest. Best one may get a gift, as she is a bit stuck time-wise.

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Hi, my name is T, I'm doing a thesis on the evaluation of web to database connectivity technologies in the Smurfit School of Business. Below, are a few questions that I need answered for my research. I am trying to prepare a consise survey on this system, if you could possibly write a few sentences in answer to each question I would be very grateful.

Any further comments or comparisons would be much appreciated too. thank you for your time. T.


1

Availability of custom functions and tags
Strength with numbers (community of users for questions etc..)
Support? How many people in the world use it? Is it well known?
Online help:
How good?

How thorough?

Bugs listed?

Quirks listed?

Is there an e-mail query facility? Do they get back to you?

2 Is it easy to pick up?
Similarities with other languages?
How quickly can you get started?

3
Strength of development environment
Development tools, are they well done?
Good GUI?

Debugging tools. Can environment do line by line debugging of code- watch variables change, see SQL executed, see variables passed from page to page etc.


4

What is the DBMS support like?
How are the drivers? ODBC? Are there Native drivers available for any databases?
Multiple data sources?

5 security

How secure is it?
Database security
Is it easy to hack?
Denial of service attack?
Session variables. Can it deal with Client Variables? Use DB for client vars?

6 interaction with 3rd parties

Excel
Reports
Writing to PDF
Dealing with flash pages?

7 administrator features

Server administrator
All web servers compatible?

8 Can it run tasks offline?

9 Scalability. Use of clusters of servers. What different operating systems?

10 Overall impression of technology

What would you change?

Why did you choose the technology in the first place?

Has it lived up to expectations?

Would you choose the same technology again? Why?

11 Any further comments

B n' M

Availability of custom functions and tags
Excellent, the Allaire developer Forum is excellent for finding free and 3rd party tags.

Strength with numbers (community of users for questions etc..)
The CFUG isn't that big but the CF-Talk list and US user groups are huge and very helpful.

Support?
I have found it quite good, but haven't really needed it. The security bulletin is excellent.


How many people in the world use it?
How long is a piece of string? Just loads.

Is it well known?
Quite well known at this stage. It seems to be the fastest development platform for dynamic pages around.

Online help:
How good?
The allaire site is excellent once you can find your way around it. It's very slow though.

How thorough?
Very thorough but it can be difficult to find exactly what it is you are looking for though.

Bugs listed?
Yes and bug fixes are released quite quickly too.

Quirks listed?
No. There aren't many but you just find them through trial and error (and maybe knowing somebody with experience).

Is there an e-mail query facility? Do they get back to you?
Yes, I haven't had to use it.

2 Is it easy to pick up?
Very easy. In fact HTML is the hard part, it is very easy to use once you have some traditioanl programming experience.

Similarities with other languages?
I suppose superficially the tags appear like an extension to html but it doesn't really bear any resemblence to anything else.

How quickly can you get started?
An hour with a good tutorial.

3
Strength of development environment
Development tools, are they well done?
Very good. It's based on the Allaire HomeSite product (which I have occasion to use also).

Good GUI?
(Yes once you know what all the buttons do it's good). The built in browser sucks however and the feeble dreamweaver style development tool sucks (design tab).

Debugging tools.
Can environment do line by line debugging of code- watch variables change, see SQL executed, see variables passed from page to page etc.
All of the above but I have had problems with previous versions regarding the line by line debugging. It seemed to be excessively complex to set up. I could not afford the time to mess with it.

4

What is the DBMS support like?
Very good it supports OLE and ODBC connections. I've never had any problems with it. The database tab is very useful on occaision but you still require a seperate db client tool for database manipulation.


How are the drivers? ODBC? Are there Native drivers available for any databases?
OLE is available for SQL (as standard).
Verifying a connection for this used to be a little flaky it has improved with the latest versions.

Multiple data sources?
Yes I use this commonly.

5 security

How secure is it?
As secure as any script based server side engine can be. (i.e.) relatively if the server admin knows his trade.

Database security

Is it easy to hack?
A little harder than a vanilla installation of ASP I think. But still vulnerable to non-CF based DB attacks.

Denial of service attack?
Just as vulnerable as an html server.

Session variables. Can it deal with Client Variables?
Yes in three manners by storing them in cookies, any datasource or in a registry.

Use DB for client vars?
As above.

6 interaction with 3rd parties

Excel
I believe interaction is possible through an ODBC driver, which I've never used, but may use soon.

Reports
No advanced reporting is supported natively.

Writing to PDF
I believe special java based tag is available to do this.

Dealing with flash pages?
Good support constantly improving since Allaire was bought by Macromedia.

7 administrator features

Server administrator

All web servers compatible?
Yes very good actually. It has saved my bacon several times with run-away processes.

8 Can it run tasks offline?
Yes scheduled tasks can be created to run with user input, I think that is what you mean here. If you mean can it be developed on a single machine not connected to the net the answer is yes I use it this way regularly for development purposes.


9 Scalability. Use of clusters of servers. What different operating systems?
Lots, one of it's best features I believe. it has increased hardware support for ip redirection in version 5.
Linux,
HP-UX
Solaris,
Win NT
Win 98
Win 2000
etc.

10 Overall impression of technology

What would you change?
Make the scripts compiled into java byte code.

Why did you choose the technology in the first place?
The development time is very short. It is very feature rich.

Has it lived up to expectations?
Yes very much so.


Would you choose the same technology again? Why?
Yes, for familiarity reasons, time is money.

11 Any further comments
Most of this information is freely available and seems to test my knowledge more than what my opinions are. It seems that as a result I'm not sure what use a lot of the answers will be.
Interesting project though.

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Anthony Geoghegan
Lead Developer
Xpert Safety.