Macromedia Tuesday announced that its ColdFusion MX scripting environment has been extended to support the latest application servers from BEA Systems Inc., IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.
The San Francisco-based company had announced in September that ColdFusion capabilities were being added to its own JRun application server as well as IBM's WebSphere and Sun's application server.
Now ColdFusion MX can also be used with BEA's WebLogic Versions 6 and 7, as well as IBM's WebSphere Version 5 and Sun ONE Application Server 7, the company said in a statement. The latest versions of the IBM and Sun products shipped in November.
Phil Costa, a senior product manager at Macromedia, said ColdFusion MX is commonly used for content publishing to Web sites, database reporting applications and internal data management and analysis applications, as well as common intranet applications, such as problem call tracing and lead tracking.
"There's still a lot of people who have ColdFusion applications," said Thomas Murphy, an analyst at Meta Group Inc. "But in general, most people have been migrating away from ColdFusion."
Murphy said that many developers used ColdFusion for their initial Web sites, but they've now turned to Microsoft Corp.'s Active Server Pages or Java Server Pages. Macromedia is trying to reposition ColdFusion as a more productive environment for building Java applications, he said. But he noted that Java developers typically run into problems when they start writing more complex enterprise-scale Java applications, not the sort that ColdFusion has typically been used to build.
Macromedia also announced that ColdFusion will run on IBM's AIX operating system in addition to Windows, Solaris and Linux. Pricing for ColdFusion MX is US$3,399 per processor.
Also this week, Macromedia announced that its JRun 4 application server will run on Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac OS X operating system. JRun sells for $899 per processor.