[thelist] Cold Fusion?

[Bruce Heerssen]

Hi Gina.

You don't *have* to shell out the bucks for CF Studio but it sure would help.
Studio includes a lot of little niceties that make coldfusion programming much
more pleasant. Chief among them is the single-user liscense of ColdFusion
server. This allows you to install a version of CF server on your local machine
for development. Otherwise you have to develop against an internet server with
CF installed.

Never fear though, there are some cheap alternatives. I believe Allaire will
still allow you to download CF Express (Ray, can you confirm this?), which is a
limited functionality CF server. Perfect for sharpening your skills, but you'll
want a more powerful version pretty soon. You can also download eval versions of
all CF server versions.

There are also two hosting providers that offer free ColdFusion hosting to
developers.
http://www.cfm-resources.com and our own evolt community
http://members.evolt.org also offers free CF hosting (along with PHP and ASP
[right Dan?]). But I'm pretty sure they wouldn't want you to actively develop
against their servers as that could cause some nasty problems for other
developers using the system.

For what it's worth, Allaire offers a very good HTML editor called homesite for
around $80 US. You could customize this editor to do many things that Studio
does. Allaire offers coldfusion help documents for download that can simply be
added to HomeSite's integrated help system. You can also try to find the tag
definitions that Studio uses and add those to Homesite. Homesite would then be
able to parse tags as you write them and offer the attributes in a droplist. It
would also enable the Tag editor for coldfusion tags. But You still wouldn't get
the Remote Development Server feature, the datasource features, or the
expression builder.

There's a reason CF Studio is so expensive. It's a hugely complex piece of
software with a seemingly endless feature list. HomeSite is less complex.

There are also some good free editors available at different sites. Perhaps
someone else on thelist can provide links. I use Studio almost exclusively so I
don't know what the best alternatives are.

Good luck with it, and I hope this helps.

- Bruce

> Message: 32
> Reply-To: <gina at sitediva.com>
> From: "Gina K. Anderson" <gina at sitediva.com>
> To: "Evolt" <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
> Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 11:29:20 -0500
> charset="iso-8859-1"
> Subject: [thelist] Cold Fusion?
> Reply-To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
>
> Hi all,
>
> What do I *have* to have in order to just try Cold Fusion to see if I would be
> interested in learning it?
>
> I know I need a hoster that supports CF, but do I *have* to buy Cold Fusion
> Studio in order to try programming with it? I don't want to spend
> $500 bucks on
> something that may easily be thrown on the heap of Perl, Javascript, and Java
> programming books I have given up on ;)
>
> I'm more inclined to the graphic design/layout/HTML side of web site
> development, but I'd like to get some kind of programming language under my
> belt. Since I've only recently begun working with the NT server
> platform (I have
> been all *NIX since I started designing), I am looking into the ASP language.
> However, I am seeing 'Cold Fusion' popping up alot, and am somewhat interested
> in it. I've got a gist of what it is, but confused on the tools needed.
>
> BTW, any "CF for dummies" type tutorial links or any sites that are somewhat
> like cgi-resources.com (only with CF apps) would be much appreciated ;)
>
> Thanks,
> Gina
>