Combining the ColdFusion Studio development environment with the ColdFusion Server back end for the Web, Allaire ColdFusion 4.5 Enterprise Edition is one of the best all-purpose Web solutions around. It's not inexpensive, but the gains you realize in productivity and expanded capability will, in many cases, reward your monetary investment handsomely. You'll probably want to upgrade to this server product after you find your site running into trouble under less capable versions of ColdFusion Server.The basic idea behind developing Web documents in ColdFusion is a markup language not unlike Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Called ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), ColdFusion Server interprets the tags on the server side and sends universally interpretable HTML output to visiting browsers as a result of its interpretation. The server can query databases, perform calculations, or do any number of other things that the CFML code specifies. Perhaps best of all, you can define your own CFML special-purpose tags in C++ or Java, store the definitions on your server, and refer to them in your pages as needed. The Enterprise Edition of ColdFusion Server runs under Windows 9x, Windows NT, Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX.
CFML's system of tags allows you to incorporate complex effects into your pages. CFML excels, for example, at generating dynamic Web pages that are based on database queries--that's the key to lots of online commerce applications. ColdFusion Server comes with drivers for several popular databases, including Oracle, Sybase, IBM DB2, and Microsoft SQL Server. It also allows you to query any ODBC data source known to the operating system. ODBC connectivity is a highly useful feature, though limited to Microsoft Windows.
ColdFusion Server Enterprise Edition adds lots of goodies to the standard ColdFusion Server in order to make it more robust under heavy loads. Among these are clustering (making several server machines look like a single (very powerful) one to the network), load balancing (for distributing work evenly among several Web servers), and failover (which helps guarantee that other machines will pick up the slack when one breaks down). The package also allows you to integrate it with Microsoft-friendly Component Object Model (COM) objects and Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). Enterprise ColdFusion also supports Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for secure communications across the network, so add that to its list of qualifications for e-commerce applications.
ColdFusion Server Enterprise Edition is a server-only product. You don't get ColdFusion Studio in this package, as you do with other Allaire products. If you want the editor, buy a copy of Allaire HomeSite, which is essentially the same as ColdFusion Studio without any bundled server software. Buy this if you need a super-robust HomeSite server--it's the best there is. --David Wall
