Adobe Coldfusion Enterprise and Developer

Use the Enterprise (Trial) version. It exposes you, as a developer, to all the functionality that the Coldfusion development platform has to offer. After the 30-day trial period it will automatically turn into the Developer version. This version excludes a number of features, but still has the core functionality you need to develop applications.

You need to develop locally on a development server and deploy separately on a production server. For large enterprise applications, you will need a third server, a test or 'staging' server. For small applications, especially where the budget is limited, you could run the development, test and production environments as 3 separate Coldfusion instances on the same machine. The risks you then take are obvious: mainly from coupling.

With Adobe Coldfusion on Amazon Web Services, all the installation you will need has already been carried out by a third party on the cloud. It is prêt-à-porter and you're ready to go. You only have to pay on a per-minute basis.

Yes, you may develop and deploy your application on the cloud. However, I would prefer to develop locally.

Some cloud pluses:

Saves time and money.

Provides scalability, for applications that need it.

Provides practically unlimited access to data sources.

As this is going to be the actual production environment, potential issues and complications will be discovered and solved beforehand.

Provides freedom from the context, restrictions or bureaucracy associated with the company's servers.

Some cloud minuses:

Privacy concerns.*

You have only limited responsibility for your own stuff*.

You might have to do it like the Lone Ranger; as yet, few colleagues are cloud-savvy and even fewer companies can entertain the risks involved.*

Cloud provider might not move quickly to solve issues that arise.

Cloud computing is still in the Wild-West phase: perils may suddenly materialize; think of unexpected costs, changing terms of use, and so on.

* pertain to me

Yes, I would recommend Coldfusion Builder.

Isoqa0 wrote:

 

Why is it indicated that you are able to build web and mobile apps with Enterprise?

Because you actually are. Could you let us know any difficulties you are facing?

Maybe because the whole product family is meant, but why on AWS? Didn't get a serial number for Builder!

I would only loosely call Coldfusion and Coldfusion Builder a product family. The Builder is a separate product, an IDE, used for developing Coldfusion applications.

There are differences in the way Adobe markets the two products. If you buy Coldfusion, you will get one or more Builder licenses, depending on Coldfusion version. But not vice versa. It is easy to work out why. Coldfusion costs thousands of dollars, but Builder only costs a few hundred. Another difference is that there are offerings of Coldfusion on the cloud, but not yet of Builder - at least as far as I know.

Yes. For example, you can use the new cfclient tag in Coldfusion 11 to build a mobile app.

You can develop an app with Coldfusion alone, but it will be tedious. In fact, in Coldfusion as in every other programming language, you may write the code in notepad. That is comparable to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the commonest mode of public transport was the horse.

Coldfusion Builder is simply an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to mechanize, speed up and make efficient the process of writing code. Coldfusion is no exception. Java, PHP and .NET all have their own IDEs.

A popular IDE for Coldfusion, besides Builder, is CFEclipse. You install it as a plugin of Eclipse. It is Open Source, free.