This column started life as a series of e-mail threads that then morphed into blog postings at www.forta.com/blog. As these points are important and need to be articulated frequently, I morphed them yet again into a column. Enjoy.
... Java
This seems to be coming up more and more frequently - ColdFusion developers being asked to defend ColdFusion against a planned move to Java and J2EE. And so, in case you end up in this situation, this is what you need to know.
For starters, any suggestion of "we need to stop using ColdFusion because we are going to use Java" demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of what exactly ColdFusion is. So, let's start with a brief explanation of the ColdFusion-Java relationship.
Applications written in ColdFusion (as of ColdFusion MX) are pure Java. Or, expressed slightly differently, ColdFusion runs on a J2EE server (either embedded, or one of your choosing) running a Sun-verified Java application (the ColdFusion engine), executing Java bytecode (compiled from your CFML source code). In other words, CFML (the code you write) is a developer-time consideration, not a run-time consideration. There is no CFML at runtime; at runtime you are executing pure Java, no more or less so than had you written the application in straight Java. Your ColdFusion application is a Java application; if you deploy a ColdFusion application what you have deployed is Java. It's as simple as that.
This means that the assertion that ColdFusion and Java are somehow mutually exclusive is just flat out incorrect. But what about the CFML code you write? Isn't that ColdFusion specific and not pure Java? And isn't that an issue? I don't think so. There is an entire industry of Java add-ons out there - tools, tags, language extensions, and more - and Java shops use these (as they should; after all, why reinvent the wheel?). If your Java code leverages third-party add-ons for reporting, or back-end integration, or charting, or ... does that make your code any less Java? Nope, not at all.
Experienced developers know that starting from step one is expensive and seldom makes sense, regardless of the language and platform. Experienced developers have toolboxes at their disposal, stuff they can leverage and reuse to be as productive as possible. Experienced developers write modular applications, separating logic and processing and presentation into tiers, allowing these to evolve independently of each other, even allowing them to be inserted or removed independently.
For Java developers, one of these tools should be ColdFusion. After all, why write dozens of lines of Java code to connect to a database when a single tag can accomplish the exact same thing (likely using the same code internally)? And why write lots of code to send an SMTP message using JavaMail APIs when a single tag can do it for you (again, using those same APIs)? You can think of ColdFusion as a bunch of prewritten Java code, stuff you can use so as to hit the ground running. And that makes your app no less Java than if you had done all the work manually.
