Coldfusion is a server side language, originally built by Allaire, later bought out by Macromedia and now owned by Adobe. It's changed alot over the most recent years. It used to be a purely procedural based language. It now supports object oriented concepts (through use of it's CFC's). It's now also based on Java (and I know many might disagree with what I'm about to say, and I know that it's not completely true, but it serves a good generalization), it is like a big java tag library (if you are familiar with that concept). I'm also a JAVA developer and see it as a great tool to have in my toolbox. You can develop in it it a couple different syntactical ways; 1) through use of tags (looks really similar to HTML etc).. 2) You can also develop through CFScript (looks like javascript). It is a very flexible language that you can extend with JAVA or other technologies, and since it supports flash remoting it is used alot behind flex RIA apps. ColdFusion is good for building apps quickly to interact with a database. The syntax is really easy to learn/follow, it has lots of built in functionality, works well with databases, and it's now object oriented (has been for a couple releases now though, so this isn't really news). Since it's tag based I personally think it's syntax makes it one of the easier languages to maintain/reverse engineer the code on. (Not as cryptic as JSP/PHP/etc.. where the code is intrusively co-mingled with HTML). P.S. - I develop in it
cold fusion is really just low end nuclear reactions... just kidding, well not really.. but coldFusion is a server side language that's mainly still around because it works very well with databases.. although it has just about all the features you would expect of a server side language. i haven't been using it all that long but i managed to pick it up pretty easily in a couple weeks with this book "Mastering ColdFusion MX by Arman Danesh, Raymond Camden, Selene Bainum and Guy Rish" and of course the help of forums like this. however if you want to learn it i suggest quickly going through a book just to get a quick idea of what it's capabilities/strong points are before you jump into programming with it.
It most certainly does.. I use Linux as a desktop and a development environment. I'm developing a site right now in ColdFusion using eclipse from my Linux box, and am running ColdFusion on the same box.
It sure does. It'll run on Windows, Linux, Unix (even a Mac). I think a lot of people are familiar with the old ColdFusion (version 5 and older ). ColdFusion is now based on Java (which runs on almost all platforms). It'll run under most of the more popular Java containers (although it's default and suggested container is JRun). It's got a whole different architecture than what it used too.