IDM: Review: Cold Fusion Studio 3.1

Software Review
Cold Fusion Studio 3.1
Allaire Corp.
By Rob Bilson
Last year I wrote in these pages a review of Allaire's popular application development platform, Cold Fusion 2.0, which stated, "Every once in a while, a development tool comes along that so greatly simplifies the way we design applications that we wonder how we ever got along without it" (IDM, May 97). At the time, I couldn't imagine a more perfect web development setup than the pairing of Cold Fusion 2.0 and Notepad I was then using.
Quaint as it seems in today's increasingly visual programming milieu, it made perfect sense at the time to write HTML and CFML (Cold Fusion Markup Language) with an ASCII text editor. Besides, what else was I going to use? Having cut my teeth authoring Web pages and CGI scripts using vi on UNIX machines, Notepad felt like a major step up!
A scant year later two generations of software have gone by. Needless to say, I am no longer composing in Notepad. But I still use Allaire's tools. The Cambridge, MA-based company recently released an integrated development environment (IDE) called Cold Fusion Studio 3.1 -- a team-oriented visual development tool designed to make Cold Fusion application development as quick and easy as possible.
In this review, I'll walk through the features that make CF Studio my current site building tool of choice. I should mention that I use Cold Fusion extensively for interactive site design, and that much of what I like about CF Studio is the perfect pair it makes with Allaire application server. But there are compelling reasons to use CF Studio even if you're using another application server, such as Bluestone's Sapphire/Web. Thanks to a rich, extensible set of wizards and XML-based customizability, CF Studio deserves consideration for all but the simplest DHTML and HTML editing jobs.
Meeting the need

Allaire appears to have taken great pains to ensure that Studio is as appealing to web neophytes as it is to seasoned webmasters. The product is built around HomeSite, Allaire's successful code-based HTML editor. Users familiar with HomeSite will make the transition to Studio with ease, while others will benefit from Studio's intuitive, highly functional interface.
The CF Studio environment is packed with useful features that put it a step above other data-driven page development tools I have used. Allaire's IDE sports an advanced programming environment, visual database tools, and team development capabilities.
Putting all this functionality in a single tool could easily have led to bloatware, an outcome Allaire sidesteps by taking a modular approach. Studio is a bundle comprising the following elements:

Cold Fusion Application Server 3.1 (single user version included with Studio)
Cold Fusion Studio 3.1
a version control program, StarBase Versions 2.0 (included with Studio; other programs, such as Microsoft's Visual Source Safe, can be used as well).

With these three tools, developers have most of what they need to build, deploy and maintain web applications.
Prelude to fusion

Installing Studio and its sister applications is as easy as inserting the CD and letting the auto-run feature kick in. A menu allows you to choose which components you wish to install, while a wizard guides you through the process. All said, total installation time for all three products was about 20 minutes.
From first launch, it is apparent that Studio's workspace is laid out to take maximum advantage of the limited real estate you have on your screen. (See Fig. 1 below.) The workspace is divided up into separate frames each containing toolbars, windows, and tabs which can be resized or completely hidden allowing for a truly customizable environment.

CF Studio IDE (Zoom to 1024x768 - 33k)
All tag toolbars are customizable and can have any number of functions added or removed from them. Additional custom tag toolbars can be added for virtually any need.
Actually building Cold Fusion or HTML pages is simple with Studio. Multiple templates can be opened at one time in Studio's editing frame. Switching between them is as simple as clicking on a tab. This allows you to work on multiple templates in a single project without having to close one in order to open another -- very useful when creating applications that interact with multiple pages.
Studio is capable of working with local and remote Cold Fusion servers, database servers, and FTP servers giving you access to the widest range of data sources. Full drag and drop support allows you to drag and drop objects such as images (image name), hyperlinks, database fields, etc. right into the document.
Web page wizardry

One of Studio's distinguishing features is its rich selection of wizards, which streamline a number of project tasks. In addition to page creation wizards for Cold Fusion, DHTML and standard HTML pages, Studio provides wizards for such sophisticated application tasks as data input and entry, accessing LDAP servers, creating mailing lists, and more.

New project wizards (Zoom - 18k)

Furthermore, Studio's wizards are XML-based and can therefore be customized to suit your needs. New wizards can be created, too.
Cold Fusion programmers will welcome Studio's Point and Click Expression Builder. This feature lets you build complex Cold Fusion expressions by combining functions, operators, and values. The expressions can then be pasted directly into the working document with a click of the mouse -- a real time saver.
When used with Microsoft Internet Explorer, Studio is also capable of dynamic page preview. By configuring IE as Studio's internal browser, you can test your application without having to leave the Studio IDE. Since the product installs with a single-user version of Cold Fusion, all developers can test their web applications right on their development machines. (Users of Netscape Navigator or other non-Microsoft browsers can set them up as external browsers, affording static page preview, because only IE can run as an object on today's Windows desktop.)
Those lacking experience with SQL will be happy to learn that Studio includes a visual query builder, shown below.

Studio's visual query builder (Zoom - 14k)

This handy little tool allows you to visually build and test SQL queries for use in your Cold Fusion applications by dragging and dropping data sources, tables, and fields. Once built, queries can be tested right inside the editor! Working queries can easily be pasted directly into your Cold Fusion templates.
Emblematic of Allaire's attention to detail is the product's extended find and replace function. Those of us tasked with managing hundreds of CF templates know that opening each one and replacing a trivial line of text can be a nightmare (well, a night's work, anyway). Studio takes care of this by allowing you to find and replace text strings in a single document, all open documents, or all documents in a particular folder (subfolders too). Mercifully, you also get the option of automatically backing up affected files -- in case you get overzealous with so much power.
Workgroup features

One of Studio's strongest features and one that offers enormous future potential is its ability to manage projects and integrate with third party version control software. Team development presents unique challenges for Web-based application developers. Cold Fusion applications usually consist of multiple templates. These templates may be authored by a single person, or by a whole team of developers. Throughout the application development life cycle, the templates that make up a Cold Fusion application may need to be modified several times. Combine all of these factors, and it is easy to see how quickly problems can develop.
Studio's project management and version control features alleviate these problems by allowing developers to maintain collections of Cold Fusion templates as projects and to place those projects under version control.
By placing the projects under version control, an audit trail of who accessed what documents when is established. Also, check in/check out is established for each template in the project so that no two people end up working on the same template at the same time -- a mishap I have experienced more times than I care to remember. (See IDM's review of NetObjects TeamFusion for a finer-grained approach to team development.)
Version control also enables you to retain multiple versions of a template throughout the project life cycle, in case a prior version is needed. You can also compare different versions to spot changes.
Team development features like check in/check out aren't exactly common yet, but they're no longer rare, either. What sets CF Studio apart from every other integrated development environment I've worked with is extensibility.
Allaire has built Studio on an XML-based markup language called VTML (Visual Tools Markup Language). As a result application developers can integrate support for their own custom tags (CFML, HDML, DHTML, XML, etc) directly into Studio. VTML, being tag-based, is relatively easy to learn.
Finding examples of VTML isn't hard, because Studio is built with it. All of the tag wizards used in Studio were created using VTML, for example, and you can open any of the supporting VTML files to learn what's going on under the hood. Further information about custom tags and VTML can be found in Allaire's Custom Tag Gallery.
Wish list

There isn't much about Studio that I don't like -- with two notable exceptions. Numero Uno is the manual. At 88 pages, the printed Using Studio guide is lacking, to say the least. The rest of the documentation is online. I know I'm not the only one who still likes to have a printed reference manual when I need to look up a tag attribute or find out how to do something. Particularly given the hundreds of built-in tags and functions in this product, documentation is NOT the place to skimp.
My other gripe: Allaire chose to have Studio print hard copies of your code through a web browser. I am not sure what design criteria led up to this -- probably something to do with platform-independence -- but it's bad news. Anyone familiar with the limitations of Web browsers in this regard can tell you that printing, an important feature of any IDE, merits a dedicated interface. Let's hope Allaire addresses this shortcoming soon.
A final comment: CF Studio isn't a true WYSIWYG web building tool like Macromedia Dreamweaver (reviewed here last issue). Its visual approach relies on configurable toolbars rather than code generation. In this sense, Studio more closely resembles Interdev, Microsoft's tool for building Active Server Pages, than a canvas-oriented visual programming environment like Symantec Visual Café. The trend for all design tools is toward a more painterly metaphor, though, so I expect to see CF Studio move in this direction -- perhaps as a result of Allaire's bundling agreements with Macromedia! (Dreamweaver comes with a copy of HomeSite.)

Two complaints in a sea of praise adds up to high marks for Cold Fusion Studio. Certainly, no Cold Fusion programmer should work without it going forward, and others will find much to like as well. I expect its open XML architecture and VTML extension capabilities to keep Studio ahead of the competition for some time to come. As a matter of fact, Allaire is hard at work on Studio 4.0, which will integrate with the next version of Cold Fusion.
Cold Fusion Studio 3.1 can be purchased directly from Allaire's Web site (www.allaire.com) or through various resellers for $295. A yearly subscription that entitles you to all upgrades and maintenance releases for that year is available for $195. Studio runs on Windows 95/NT.
Allaire Corp. One Alewife Center Cambridge, MA 02140 Phone: 617-761-2000 Fax: 617-761-2001