ColdFusion is a mature and proven tool for quickly developing and delivering scalable e-business applications. ColdFusion does, and will continue to work closely with Microsoft platform technologies. ColdFusion was the first Web application server available on Windows NT, and it continues to strongly support strategic Microsoft technologies including Windows NT / Windows 2000, COM/COM+, Internet Explorer, IIS, and BackOffice.

Within the Microsoft platform, Active Server Pages (ASP) is offered as a native programming environment to create Internet applications. Both ColdFusion and ASP have been implemented in tens of thousands of websites throughout the world.
Both have delivered complex, high performance, scalable applications serving mission critical functions for some of the most demanding sites.

While each provides unique strengths, ColdFusion, as a complete solution for the wide range of demands in today’s Internet, is a clear choice. Why?

Cold Fusion’s overall simplicity and tag-based syntax make it easy to learn. It has a powerful IDE that can help the webmaster get productive quickly, and it can scale to handle even the biggest commercial Web sites. There are a lot of commercial
grade web enabling tools on the market, and they all do similar things. Realistically, most of what you can do in CF you can duplicate in ASP or PHP. But ColdFusion shines, because it lets you work faster and better.

The reason for this is simple: Unlike other tools, ColdFusion wasn't patched together out of existing technologies. It was designed from the ground up to be a Web application platform. Because the creators of CF weren't saddled with the
constraints of past paradigms, they were free to find the best way to solve the problems Web developers face. This allowed them to streamline aspects of ColdFusion that were clunky in other technologies. This conceptual superiority is one of reasons programmers like ColdFusion so much. No one likes to mess around with intermediary objects. If you wish to execute a query, it should be straightforward. If I wish to output some values, let me do it.

With CF, there's not a lot of mystery about how to do something once you figure out what it is you want to do. In the same spirit, ColdFusion Studio tries to automate the coding process as much as possible. Since it features automatic tag completion,
expression builders, tag choosers, and wizards, the amount of stuff you actually have to key in is minimal. CF Studio gives you almost instant access to every command, method, property, constant, function, and variable available. This minimizes the amount of time you spend looking for information and maximizes the time you spend using it.

Built-in customization features give experienced developers even more control over their environment. Aside from the standard "customize" dialogs found in almost every IDE, CF Studio comes packed with VTML and WIZML. VTML provides a simple way
for developers to customize almost every facet of CF Studio, and WIZML allows them to quickly and easily build integrated wizards. When VTML and WIZML are used together, any process that's not already streamlined can be fully efficient in a
few minutes.

Internet users were asked about six specific Website policies and information for e-commerce sites. For each of the six policies examined, more than three-quarters of users say that it is very important that e-commerce sites have a professional Website design, provide specific, accurate information about the site’s policies and practices.

Once you've got your environment set up, you need a way to debug your code. CF Studio obliges with an excellent built-in debugger. It allows you to set breakpoints and watches and keeps track of the tag stack, variables, record sets, and CF output generated during execution. With this information, you can step through an entire application and locate errors with ease.

Overall, ColdFusion is simple, powerful, and efficient.Further
more the underlying engine is moving to a java base (Allaire/
Macromedia are currently enabling Cold Fusion to interact with
Enterprise JavaBeans). Having said that, we are not Allaire
fanatics, and have no loyalty to ColdFusion. We are equally
happy and experienced coding in any other environment
(e.g. asp, java). But, in our opinion, producing the R3 site
in Cold Fusion makes sense given the existing collateral.