Understanding ColdFusion

I am trying to understand the why of using ColdFusion.

It is a server side language, which can run Java EE applications, and of course has all of the other perks of being a server side language as far as dynamic display of content.

Does ColdFusion have a GUI development tool, where textboxes, labels, listboxes, etc are dragged onto the page, and are then coded as to how they should perform?

Any inuput is much appreciated.

-Mike

Macromedia Dreamweaver has a lot of drag and drop editor stuff. I don't like it though, I prefer to use CFEclipse, a plugin for the outstanding Java editor Eclipse. It has no GUI tools for CF but has excellent support for code snippets and such, which I prefer over drag and drop anyway. I prefer to know exactly what the editor is doing. Just look at all the code the Visual Studio generates, that sort of thing scares me.

The real benefits of CF are extremely rapid development (far faster than any other platform), extremely easy to learn and use, built in support for a huge range of things (email, graphs, web services, text searches, Flash generation, Flash remoting, etc.), very cheap compared to other Java servers like Websphere or Weblogic, vibrant and helpful community.

It sounds like you are equating ColdFusion and DreamWeaver as being one and the same. Do you think it can be looked at this way?

Also, are you saying tha ColdFusion is really just a server for running Java?

No, Dreamweaver is a multilanguage editor that happens to support CFML. ColdFusion and Dreamweaver are not coupled at all, so you can use one and not use the other if you want.

CFMX *is* a Java application that takes CFML and compiles it to Java classes for execution by a Java servlet container. This is usually JRun which comes built in or bundled with CFMX, but can also be Websphere, Tomcat, Weblogic, JBoss, or any other J2EE server.