Allaire Corp has announced version 4.0 of its flagship ColdFusion web application server, which is used to develop database-driven applications for deployment over the web. The ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) tags enable programmers to write SQL commands, which are transmitted to the database by means of ODBC and, new with this version, Microsoft’s OLEDB. The tool then inserts them into an HTML template, which is sent to the browser. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Allaire filed for its $35m initial public offering in early August which, due to the ensuing quiet period, it cannot say much about right now. New ColdFusion features this time on the scalability front include native support for server clusters. Allaire has licensed an embedded version of Bright Tiger Inc’s ClusterCats. It doesn’t have the full functionality of Bright Tiger’s product, but it gives ColdFusion application load balancing and server failover. Allaire product marketing director Adam Berrey says that, significantly, the load balancing is based on the load of the ColdFusion server, rather than the web server. He also says that customers have already used ColdFusion with other clustering tools, such as Cisco’s LocalDirector, but this is the first tight integration. Beyond Windows, Sun’s Solaris is the only Unix platform supported thus far, but Berrey says the company is investigating the possibility of doing versions for HP-UX and Linux, but he stressed that it is not yet committed to producing ColdFusion for those platforms. On the development side, support has been added for Corba and XML and ColdFusion 4.0 introduces a new visual development environment and server-side source code control as well as remote debugging with the new version of the development tool, ColdFusion Studio. ColdFusion has supported connection to LDAP directories since version 3.1, but now uses the technology to authenticate users on the server. Allaire has an alliance program of more than 1,000 partners voicing support for the new release. ColdFusion web application server is sold for web server deployment as ColdFusion server 4.0; the visual tools are sold for workstation deployment as ColdFusion Studio 4.0. The server comes in an enterprise and a professional edition and each of them comes with a single-user license for Studio. The former runs on both Windows NT and Solaris and costs $3,500 per server, up to 8 CPUs. The professional edition costs $1,300 runs on NT only and is licensed on a per server basis, up to four CPUs on each. The development tool, ColdFusion Studio, costs $400 and is available on Windows 95/98 and NT. The suite will ship within 60 days and will be sold both direct and through Allaire’s resellers. Allaire also produces the HomeSite HTML editor. The company was formed by chairman JJ Allaire in early 1995 and released its first cut of ColdFusion in July of that year. Version 2.0 followed in November 1996 and 3.0 in July 1997 (see our sister publication, Inter/intranet Tools Bulletins review of 2.0 and assessment of 3.0 at http://www.computerwire.com/bulletinsuk).
