Macromedia ColdFusion 5 combines an intuitive, tag-based language, rich, visual tools, and a proven, reliable Web application server to give you a fast and easy way to build and deploy powerful Web applications. At the heart of every ColdFusion application is ColdFusion Server, a powerful Web application server. It combines an open, extensible architecture that integrates easily with existing systems, and built-in application and infrastructure services that help you present information elegantly. The Professional version is best for moderate-sized Web sites and departmental applications; for larger-sized Web sites and companies, ColdFusion Enterprise should be considered.ColdFusion supports a powerful server-side scripting language--ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML)--that is extremely easy to learn and cleanly integrates with all popular Web languages and technologies. ColdFusion works with multi-tier architectures through COM, CORBA, and EJB integration. It can also be easily extended with new components created with Java Servlets, Java classes, or C/C++.
The features new to this version include the ability to create reusable functions to accelerate development, and easy integration of data from heterogeneous sources by merging and querying data in memory using standard SQL. And you can now quickly detect and diagnose server errors with built-in server reporting and the new Log File Analyzer. Create professional-quality charts and graphs from queried data without leaving the ColdFusion environment, and index and search up to 250,000 documents with optimized performance. This new version also allows you to create professional-quality tabular reports from queried data and applications, and take advantage of dramatically improved server performance and reduced memory usage to deliver faster, more scalable applications.
