ColdFusion is a language used to develop applications for the web. It has been developed by Macromedia. It is not a free software but a free developer version can be downloaded from the Internet for trial. It is worth its price as it offers a high development speed.

No Need for a Test Server
ColdFusion comes along with an entire application to provide help in writing this language. It can be used with IIS and Apache. It can also act as a test server while you write scripts. ColdFusion can often be unreliable and slow due to the fact that it runs on a Java framework. However, Java support enables it to run on other operating systems as well. Writing a page in ColdFusion is almost equivalent to the use of Java for it, and is less difficult.

Thus, the use of ColdFusion means exchanging website's speed with more choices and compatibility and quicker time of development.

Easy to Learn
ColdFusion is quite similar to HTML, and hence easy to learn. It acts like an extension for HTML tags, not like a programming language which provides the output in the form of HTML. This is due to the fact that it has been specifically designed for the web.

Despite the fact that it is quite simple, ColdFusion is capable of competing with languages such as JSP and ASP.Net.

CFScript
It is naturally difficult to write complex tags for complicated things that can be done on dynamic web pages. To counter this, Macromedia has introduced the CFScript which is a language similar to Javascript. Most programmers find it easier than the actual ColdFusion tags.

Java
The strength of ColdFusion lies in the fact that it can call any Java classes in the script with the use of the createObject function. This is a very useful feature as it enables you to access all J2EE libraries and make use of any existing Java codes. Due to this feature, Macromedia is marketing ColdFusion as 'a scripting layer for J2EE'.

Integration with Other Macromedia Products
In case you design your pages with Dreamweaver, scripting your pages in ColdFusion will be beneficial as you can take the advantages of their integration. The ColdFusion code can be inserted into Dreamweaver conveniently. Its built-in editor can be used to edit the code in any way you want to without ruining the Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG view.

ColdFusion also integrates well with Macromedia Flash. But you should always resist the temptation to design ColdFusion scripted websites with gaudy Flash interfaces.