The application server market is red-hot with vendors, open-source software developers, and application-service providers competing to be the platform for business Internet solutions. Businesses, better educated about the relationship between technology and their bottom line, are again looking at technology investments as they would any other...money matters.

At the end of the day the application must work - a purely technical decision. But the cost of development, maintenance, and scalability should dominate decision making thereafter. These three pillars of a financially sensible technology solution are composed of development time (how long an application takes to create), access to IT talent (what does it cost to get good programmers), and the cost of the software/hardware over time (total cost of ownership).

On this score Allaires ColdFusion reigns supreme. However, as the CIO for a Chicago IT recruiting firm and a ColdFusion developer, I believe Allaire has done a poor job of communicating this critical message to the marketplace.

Cost of Development
Rapid application development (RAD) technologies (like CF) get a bad rap in some hard-core technology circles, but from a business perspective it just makes sense. The old saw, "Time is money," still cuts. CFs RAD capabilities are unmatched by anything short of an Application Service Provider solution for time-to-market, translating into lower fees for contract or permanent programmers. Tangentially, consulting firms that code in another language (ASP, for example) and CF will freely admit that CF makes any fixed-bid development opportunity more profitable.

CFs development speed - due in large part to it's tag metaphor - means accessibility across a development team, where senior developers and novices can work the same application in concert. From a business perspective this means less expensive HTML coders with a bit of training can make meaningful contributions to development, saving serious cash. By comparison, there's simply no way to plug an HTML-savvy developer into a .jsp or .asp solution, no matter how simple.

Beyond the tag metaphor, Allaires "Developers Exchange" Tag Gallery provides developers with a rich library, prebuilt functionality, and access to highly specialized solutions that shorten development time. Savvy CF coders have also found the Exchange to be a source of secondary revenue for their code, and end users might benefit from packaging the objects their e-commerce projects generate for resale.

Finally, as CF is an architecture that easily supports the inclusion of components from other popular languages, developers can incorporate prebuilt, complex objects into their applications with only a few lines of code. A commitment to CF doesn't have to be a monogamous relationship.

Cost of Maintenance
Debugging and expanding an application is a financial threat to businesses. Competitive advantages through technology are short- lived and expensive to maintain.

A solid application architecture anticipates the changing nature of e-strategies and the migration toward emerging technologies and standards that provide a competitive advantage. Application servers that lack support for a wide array of diverse technologies cripple a businesss ability to compete and cost that organization more when it comes to duplicating like functionalities from other server packages.

ColdFusion, which is accessible to numerous document object models, programming languages, object brokers, and nearly anything that can be custom-coded in C++ or Java, can be the only exhibit in the museum of technological diversity. Again, CFs tag-based metaphor reduces those very complex functional concepts like XML, for example, into comparatively easy-to-understand tags like CF_WDDX and encapsulates the package in a RAD environment.

By example, the cost and time needed to implement a CF_WDDX solution over a comparable data transfer channel using Perl or Java provide ample evidence of CFs ability to provide time-based savings.

Scalability
The most frequent criticisms still levied against ColdFusion are concerns about the servers scalability. Despite Allaires addition of load balancing and improved session management, the message hasn't reached the masses.

A properly architected CF solution can scale across multiple servers geographically dispersed and can support as many users as the underlying hardware and OS can sustain. That said, it seems Allaires offerings on NT are actually more expensive to deploy across multiple installations than a comparable .asp solution (based on Microsofts competitive upgrade pricing). Fortunately, with ColdFusion now shipping for Linux, a combination of CF, MySQL, and Linux can scale at a very low cost.

Conclusion
Sex sells...even in Newton, Massachusetts. Java and the J2EE specification are sexy and expensive technologies. Moreover, C#, XML, and application service provider-based solutions may pave new directions in the processing and delivery of data. But Allaires still unparalleled strength is, I believe, based on the simplification of complex and powerful capabilities and on enabling the soft-core and low-cost IT professional to deliver professional results.

Allaire delivered cost-effective solutions at a time when skepticism about the Internet prevented bonfires with VC dollars as kindling. As e-business is again under the gun to cut costs and produce profits, the CF community and Allaire have a second chance to sing the praises of ColdFusion that would be music to any CFO or CEOs financial ears.