[WEB4LIB] An Informal ColdFusion Survey

[Brian Westra]

I've done a number of projects with ColdFusion, and it's worked well to 
meet those needs. I know many of you have had great success with other 
approaches to building Web applications, and I think there are pros and 
cons to each approach. In each case, someone has to make a decision as to 
what will work best within the constraints of available staffing and 
technical expertise, hardware, total cost of ownership, and other 
parameters. Personally, I'm not sure that it serves anyone to get into some 
kind of evangelistic fervor over Web application server platforms; I wish I 
had the time to play around with several different options. As it is, I 
think you find what works for you and go with it.

At the Health Sciences Library, in the next iteration of HealthLinks, we 
will be using ColdFusion 4.5 on Windows 2000, with IIS 5 (and Linux/Apache 
for static pages that ColdFusion writes out); SQL Server 7 is on a separate 
Windows 2000 server.

As others have pointed out, there are many useful resources out there. For 
those of you who are working with ColdFusion, there is a small "ColdFusion 
for Libraries" discussion list. For more information and other resources, 
please see  http://faculty.washington.edu/bwestra/cflist.html


Brian Westra
Library Systems
Health Sciences Library, University of Washington
bwestra at u.washington.edu     206-543-7497


At 09:12 AM 1/18/2001 -0800, you wrote:
>We are looking at using ColdFusion to serve databases via the Web, etc. I
>know a lot of Web4Libbers are running CF, and I have some questions about
>exactly how you folks are doing it:
>
>1. What version of ColdFusion are you running?
>
>2. What operating system are you using to run ColdFusion?
>
>3. What kind of Web server are you using in conjunction with ColdFusion?
>
>4. Is there anything you would do differently if you had ColdFusion to do
>all over again?
>
>If there are more than a few replies, I will summarize the final tally for
>the list.
>
>Donald A. Barclay
>Houston Academy of Medicine-                         always the beautiful
>answer
>Texas Medical Center Library                         who asks a more
>beautiful question
>dbarclay at library.tmc.edu                                     --e.e. cummings
>713-799-7120