What is ColdFusion?
The ColdFusion 4.0 Web application server is the fastest way to build and deliver scalable applications that integrate browser, server and database technologies. From e-commerce to business automation, from intranets to the Internet, ColdFusion gives you the power to develop and deploy advanced systems quickly and easily. The visual programming, database and debugging tools in ColdFusion Studio accelerate your development. The proven technology in ColdFusion Server scales to deliver reliability and performance for your most demanding Web applications. ColdFusion's open integration with databases, e-mail, XML and other enterprise technology gives you the ability to build complex systems quickly. And ColdFusion provides security on every level from development through deployment.

What is new in version 4.0?
ColdFusion 4.0 is a major release that includes new features in every part of the product including both the visual tools and the server. Most importantly, the new release includes features that support faster development and more scalable deployment. ColdFusion 4.0 also offers enhanced technology integration and more robust security.

What is ColdFusion Server?
ColdFusion Server is the deployment platform for delivering ColdFusion Web applications. Running as a multithreaded service with native support for load balancing and fail over, ColdFusion Server provides a highly scalable foundation for high volume, content rich, transaction intensive Web applications.

What is ColdFusion Studio?
ColdFusion Studio is an integrated development environment with an array of highly productive visual tools for creating ColdFusion applications. It includes all of the HTML editing technology from the award-winning tool, Allaire HomeSite. ColdFusion Studio incorporates visual database, programming and debugging tools as well as support for remote team development, site management and deployment. ColdFusion Studio is licensed separately from ColdFusion Server.

What is ColdFusion Administrator?
Part of ColdFusion Server, ColdFusion Administrator is a set of tools for remote server administration. With ColdFusion Administrator server managers can easily monitor, configure, tune, and maintain ColdFusion Servers, applications, and clusters.

What are ColdFusion Extensions (CFX)?
ColdFusion Extensions (CFX) are an open XML-based framework for extending ColdFusion with new server components and connectivity to enterprise systems using COM, CORBA, C/C++, VBScript, JavaScript, or CFML. CFXs extend CFML with new server side tags. With CFXs, developers can make their code more modular and reusable, integrate with legacy systems or business logic, and extend ColdFusion to support new functionality. Hundreds of third party CFXs are available through the Allaire DevCenter.

What are Visual Tool Extensions (VTX)?
Visual Tool Extensions (VTX) are an open technology for extending ColdFusion Studio and Allaire HomeSite with new functionality including support for new CFX, new XML vocabularies, and other applications. VTXs can also be used to create new Wizards. VTXs can be created with the XML-compliant Visual Tool Markup Language (VTML), or through VBScript and COM using the Visual Tool Object Model (VTOM).

What is ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML)?
The ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) is a highly advanced tag-based server scripting language for building Web applications. CFML uses a syntax that closely resembles HTML and XML, so it is ideally suited to programming applications that use these markup languages. For new developers, tag-based CFML syntax makes complex programming easy. Advanced developers will find more than 70 tags and 200 functions in CFML, as well as structured exception handling and integration with COM and CORBA.

What are the advantages of CFML?
CFML is the most advanced server-scripting language available on the Web. CFML provides a wide range of common programming constructs, a powerful function library and complete expression syntax. But because it is based on tags, CFML offers three major advantages over other server-side scripting languages. It tightly integrates with HTML and XML which makes the process of developing Web applications easier and faster. CFML provides a high level of encapsulation for complex processes, eliminating the need for excessive scripting and increasing developer productivity. Finally, CFML is easy to extend with new ColdFusion Extensions (CFX) that serve as re-usable components.

What are the differences between ColdFusion Server 4.0 Pro and Enterprise?
ColdFusion Server 4.0 Professional is designed to service a wide range of Web applications from simple departmental intranet applications to major Internet applications. ColdFusion Server 4.0 Enterprise is designed to deliver large scale, high volume, transaction-intensive Web applications for enterprise-wide projects, e-commerce, and high traffic Internet sites. ColdFusion Server 4.0 Enterprise supports the following features NOT available in ColdFusion Server 4.0 Professional:
   - Availability on Solaris
   - Dynamic Load Balancing (clustering)
   - Automatic Server Fail Over (clustering)
   - Connectivity to CORBA
   - Native Database Drivers for Oracle and Sybase
   - Server Sandbox Security

Who should use ColdFusion 4.0?
ColdFusion 4.0 can be used on every level from the department to the enterprise. Easy-to-use visual tools make ColdFusion great for new developers. At the same time advanced features such as interactive debugging, CORBA integration and structured exception handling make ColdFusion ideal for developing complex Web applications. And native support for load balancing and fail over mean that ColdFusion can scale to handle the volume on the most demanding Web sites.

How is ColdFusion scalable?
ColdFusion Server runs as a multi-threaded service with advanced thread pooling, database connection caching, just-in-time compilation and automatic failure recovery. As a result, the basic server will scale with hardware on single machine. Moreover, ColdFusion 4.0 has native support for server clustering. So applications can be delivered on a multi-server cluster with dynamic load balancing and automatic fail over. This means you can build very large volume sites with high-availability for the continuous service your most demanding applications require.

Can ColdFusion handle large volume sites?
Yes. ColdFusion is already used to deliver a wide range of complex, high volume Internet sites and intranet applications. New features in ColdFusion 4.0 make it possible to more easily scale your servers to handle the requirements of the most demanding applications.

What technologies are natively integrated?
ColdFusion supports native integration to a wide range of technologies including databases through ODBC, OLE-DB and native drivers; e-mail through POP and SMTP; directories through LDAP; file servers through native file system support and FTP; distributed objects through COM and CORBA. Through ColdFusion Extensions, you can use CFML, C/C++ and other languages to extend ColdFusion to connect to any system. Hundreds of third party extensions are available through the Allaire Developer's Exchange. ColdFusion can interface with a wide range of online payment technologies as well as other key third party technologies.

How does this application server increase developer productivity?
ColdFusion is the fastest way to build and deploy complex, scalable Web applications. The ColdFusion programming environment is based on an intuitive tag-based server-scripting language called the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). CFML seamlessly integrates with HTML for display and XML for data structuring, making it a highly productive programming environment. In addition, ColdFusion Studio supports a rich array of visual database, programming and debugging tools. The tools accelerate the process of building, deploying and maintaining Web applications.

What OS platforms are supported?
The visual tools in ColdFusion are available on Windows NT and Windows 95/98. ColdFusion Server is available on Windows 95/98, Windows NT and Solaris. Support for HP-UX will be available in Q1 of 1999 and Allaire has announced plans to support Linux in a future release.

What Web servers are supported?
Without clustering, ColdFusion Server can work with any Web server that supports ISAPI, NSAPI, Apache API or CGI. This includes Microsoft Internet Information Server, Netscape Enterprise Server, Apache and others. With clustering, used on very large volume sites, ColdFusion Server currently only works with IIS on Windows NT and Netscape Enterprise Server on Solaris. Support for Apache on Solaris and Netscape Enterprise Server on Windows NT will be available in Q1 1999.

How does ColdFusion support Java?
On the server, Java can be used to extend ColdFusion through COM or CORBA. In the browser, ColdFusion can be used to dynamically drive Java applets and it natively supports extending HTML forms with Java form controls.

How does ColdFusion support XML?
ColdFusion is ideally suited for dynamically generating XML documents. For exchanging data between servers and between servers and browsers, ColdFusion employs a new technology from Allaire called Web Distributed Data Exchange (WDDX) which automatically translates data into and out of XML so that it can be easily transferred between systems. In a future release, ColdFusion will support parsing XML documents.

How can ColdFusion be extended?
ColdFusion supports a powerful technology for extending the server and language with new components that are accessed through new CFML tags. ColdFusion Extensions (CFX) can be created with CFML, C/C++, COM, CORBA, VBScript or JavaScript.

How does ColdFusion connect to databases?
ColdFusion can connect to databases through Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) drivers or OLE DB. ColdFusion Server 4.0 Enterprise also supports connectivity with Oracle, Informix, DB2 and Sybase databases through native database drivers.

What are the issues in moving from Windows NT to UNIX?
In general, ColdFusion applications will run identically on Windows NT and UNIX. UNIX is case sensitive, so any file references must be in the correct case to work. In addition, there are a small number of features which are available on one platform and not on the other. See the ColdFusion Feature Matrix for complete details on feature availability.

What is the single user edition of ColdFusion Server?
The single-user edition of ColdFusion Server is a version of the server that is limited to use by a single developer. It is included with ColdFusion Studio to support local development at an individual programmer's workstation. It is not available separately.