ColdFusion Builder Reviews & Product Details

Coldfusion, is one of the oldest web development platforms available. It is not only a jack of all trades, it's a master of many as well.

It's owned by Adobe, which gives it excellent document processing abilities. Think PDF creation. It handles MS Excel creation as well.

It integrates nicely with the latest technologies. For example I use it seamlessly with Amazon S3 storage, to read and write. Use it with the latest Bootstrap releases and it plays nicely living on the same server with PHP on my Linux boxes. Handles JSON, XML in and out. I use it to consume and publish APIs from a variety of sources.

While I don't use these now, I have used it in the past as an FTP server, POP, IMAP, client and more. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

With less people using it these days, it could be harder to get support for advanced usage, however there are plenty of large legacy apps still in us at large organizations and educational institutions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As technology grows day by day, parallel tools also provide more comfort to the end users. What I like best about this is the robust caching and the ability to publish a component as a REST service. Boost performance by caching portions of pages with infrequently updated data, and improve custom handling of region-specific data by creating multiple cache regions on the fly. Improve server performance by sparing server resources through a parallel caching process and advanced caching libraries. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The first thing is that the license is very expensive and it takes moderate space to install it on a system. If someone has been working with legacy versions, they can understand what is happening inside, but versions 10 and 11 are very high level. It is good in some ways and not good in others. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

ColdFusion allows for rapid development of database-driven websites. All the functions of a CRUD app with design and functionality can be developed quickly and easily. There is a short learning curve for the language which is nice.

I like the ability to create ColdFusion components that you can re-use among your applications. The ColdFusion scheduler is nice too for scheduling processes.

There are many features that I haven't even used but know they are there if I need them. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Cost and availability. I have wrote some pretty nice applications that I couldn't sell to others because of the platform.

New developers coming into our team usually do not know the language. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The good markup language for the great Web designing. It also provides enterprise-level features using LDAP and other connectivity options which help organizations improve security. Client-side validation is included. And converting Word to PDF is excellent. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The IDE is not as good as other IDEs in the market and makes life hard to deploy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

ColdFusion allows for rapid development of database-driven websites. There is a short learning curve for the language which makes it a breeze. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The cost is extremely high and the language is fairly unknown to new developers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Creating a proof of concept application is a breeze, using either procedural or OO coding styles. Using a mature MVC framework like ColdBox with its related testing and mock up tools, it's quite easy to build extremely secure applications of any size. The latest versions of ColdFusion include native functionality to sanitize user input, secure against Cross-Site Scripting attacks and protect against the rest of OWASP Top Ten list. Connecting to various databases, cloud services and other systems are relatively easy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The native functions to create UI controls and JavaScript form validation should never be used. There are much more mature JavaScript libraries that can handle that type of functionality very easily. They need the ability to disable groups of functionality like those at the server level. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Colfusion allows for a quick turnaround to any project. The platform has been around for a long time, and while there have been some misconception about it in the past, it is still a very valid platform to build web application with it. New users will learn it fast and it is purely a scripting language.

With the advent of open source CFML engines there is no reason not to use it for some projects.

Especially the easy interaction with databases is a big plus of Coldfusion. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Though, the syntax has changed or let's say you have the option to write in pure cfscript, the XML syntax might not be something to every ones liking, especially for people coming from more "pure" languages.

No command line support and the rather small community is also something that might not work for some. Rather small "solutions/packages" out there. So one ends up writing a lot of code. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Very easy to pick up and start developing in. Coldfusion is built specifically for building web applications so there are many convenience functions built into the language itself. The framework CfWheels provides a Ruby on Rails like framework that is worth trying. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Very easy to create unmaintainable code because of its scripting origins. Objects were an afterthought and the cfscript (a new syntax that looks more like Java) is missing functionality. There are a lot of weird things that Coldfusion does that are Coldfusion specific and have a questionable design. For example, booleans when outputted on a page will display as "YES" or "NO" or that numbers are sometimes strings but not always. There is not a ton of community support and the support that does exist is mostly outdated. Because of the lack of community support there are not a lot of tools and libraries. Those that do exist are usually not updated and require tweaking. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

CF is very easy to learn. After learning for a week or two you direct jump to development. There are very good frameworks are available in the market like cfwheel, ColdBox, fw etc. There are open source options also available for CF like Lucee. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are a lot of open bugs for the product still available in the bugbase. Adobe is a bit slower in fixing them up. Adobe should put more focus on that. License cost is a bit higher, so clients hesitate a bit to buy it. It's not properly marketed by Adobe, that's why it's not much famous. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is a well-structured tag-based scripting language. Applications are scoped with event handlers at application, session, and request level. It is easy to write database queries without the need to concatenate strings, although using query parameters can inhibit this a little. Strong integration with Java makes Coldfusion fully-compatible with Java libraries. It is relatively easy to write a SOAP server and client for testing or implementing web services. cfscript allows you to break away from writing tag-based code, although the syntax for some constructs is unusual. The XML functions have proved handy to interpret and process raw data extracted from databases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The reliance on a Java Virtual Machine can make Coldfusion a bit clunky for small web apps. Code needs to be interpreted by the application server which itself runs inside a JVM. It's better suited for large enterprise applications. Integration with IIS and .NET services can be cumbersome. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.