ColdFusion advice

[Nancy Burford]

Candice & others -
I'm just getting started with CF myself, we purchased it last fall & I only just now got a training opportunity a couple of weeks ago.  Last summer several of us from this library took a field trip to Dallas to visit another academic medical  library using CF & doing neat things with their web presence (all of your question 4 uses).
We purchased the following:
ColdFusion Server
ColdFusion Studio
SQL Server
and loaded them onto the webserver (Win2K with IIS 5).
Up until now, I've used Access for my in-house databases, but the folks in Dallas found Access crashed when they had too many people hitting it at once.  That's why we got SQL Server, and we've moved over a couple of simple databases over for testing.
I don't have anything up and running right now, since I haven't been able to get around to it, but one of my co-workers has played with it and gotten a pretty good display of the electronic journal list (but it's not ready for public consumption yet).  That was the primary motivating factor - maintenance on a static ejournals page gets time-consuming.  Now that I've had the training, I'm seeing all sorts of things I could streamline... I just need to remind myself that just because I _can_ do something, doesn't mean that I _should_

There is a CF in libraries listserv (that's not too busy) hosted by the University of Washington Health Sciences Library; the information page is:
http://faculty.washington.edu/bwestra/cflist.html

Other resources that people have given me are:
http://www.sys-con.com/coldfusion/
http://www.fusebox.org/ 

CF is _not_ cheap, and if you have people comfortable with using other tools, my son highly recommends PHP & MySQL - he's also used the free, stripped-down version of CF - that he used to build a fairly complex e-commerce site for a non-profit organization.

Nancy

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Nancy Burford
Librarian, Digital Services Coordinator
Medical Sciences Library <http://msl.tamu.edu>
Texas A&M University
College Station, Texas 77843-4462
nburford at medlib.tamu.edu
979.845.1820
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