Section 2.2. Benefits of Moving to the Java Technology Platform

   

2.2 Benefits of Moving to the Java Technology Platform

A major benefit of the new architecture is performance. Because numerous companies have invested time and resources in optimizing the performance of the Java Virtual Machine (which executes Java commands), ColdFusion templates should run faster. This performance benefit was demonstrated at the 2001 ColdFusion Developers Conference, in which a bit of prime number crunching code was run concurrently on both versions of the architecture.

Another benefit to this architecture is that it protects your code and encourages distribution of applications. Instead of encrypting ColdFusion templates with the built-in command line utility cfencrypt (which was notoriously weak), developers can now precompile their applications as Java bytecode. This offers developers better protection for their work.

Note

Despite the fact that ColdFusion MX templates are compiled into Java bytecode, they require a copy of ColdFusion MX Server to run properly. This is because of dependencies on other ColdFusion runtime components .


There are many enhancements to the environment that make ColdFusion MX interesting. Developers can extend their work by importing JavaServer Pages (JSP) tag libraries and even execute JSPs directly from ColdFusion MX. Because Java is under the hood, MX can now fully support the Unicode standard. This means the ability to work in double-byte languages such as Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. ColdFusion MX also means we can take advantage of messaging services and legacy connectors offered by other application servers.

By standing on the Java technology platform, ColdFusion MX represents a big step forward for ColdFusion. While, as noted, it is not necessary to learn Java to continue working with ColdFusion, it is certainly not a bad idea. Knowing the language will give you more power as you continue developing ColdFusion, it will give you an alternative language if the situation calls for it, and it will give you greater flexibility to meet the demands of tomorrow's integrated systems.

Note

While one could easily (if one wanted to violate license restrictions) decompile a CF MX app back to Java source, one would not be able to de-compile back to the CFML source. To reverse engineer back to CFML source, one would need to reverse engineer the CF-to-Java translation process.


We will leave our discussion of ColdFusion at that. The remainder of this book is devoted to Java, with an emphasis on its Web technologies, since I presume that, as a ColdFusion developer, that's what you're primarily interested in. Where relevant, differences, similarities, or other distinctions are made with respect to how ColdFusion works, in the hope that it will help the Java topic be more quickly and easily understood . These distinctions will generally take the form of notes.


   
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Java for ColdFusion Developers
Java for ColdFusion Developers
ISBN: 0130461806
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 206
Authors: Eben Hewitt

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