Cold Fusion is one of the earliest server-side tag languages. Cold Fusion tags (there are hundreds like <cfoutput> and <cfquery>) resemble HTML and XML. But CFML-Cold Fusion Markup Language is a proprietary language that is used for Web database connections. In fact, Cold Fusion has pioneered many of the techniques used to make web database connections easier to do. Cold Fusion has evolved over the past five years to encompass a wider selection of backend servers that it is compatible with as the basic runtime engine for Cold Fusion has been converted to JRun which is a J2EE compliant webserver.

Macroemedia has extended its reach by making Cold Fusion able to drive such popular Web servers such as BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, Sun One, as well as popular Open Source servers such as Apache and JBoss. This means developers have the convenience of Cold Fusion database frontend with the power of some powerful, full service J2EE implementations. In upcoming reviews we shall explore these interfaces in more detail.

Just like Perl, PHP, and ASP - Cold Fusion is a server side application - thus client side operations such as form field validations, quick dynamic presentations or reports, and/or interactive calculations sometimes are better done with JavaScript or Flash or Java applets. Cold Fusion does have APIs that allow interfacing with these tools and that is a frequent approach with templates available for validations and business rules.

In fact this is one of the major reasons that Cold Fusion continues to have a substantial following. Many large Web Hosting suppliers such as GoDaddy and the new Microsoft Web offering use Cold Fusion as an attractive tool for their upcale web hosting capabilities. In addition, Cold Fusion has the ability to work as a easy to use database and Web Services frontend for so many different servers from J2EE through to Apache. Finally, Adobe is pushing that role for its Flex 2 RIA-Rich Internet Application tool

Cold Fusion also has the advantage of running on Windows, Mac and Linux servers. The Linux version is still the poor cousin of Cold Fusion. Bu