ColdFusion Web Development

DBS has been developing web software with ColdFusion since our company was formed in 2000.

We chose ColdFusion as our primary web development tool after comparing it ourselves hands-on with other products. We found ColdFusion to be significantly more productive than either Java or .Net, because the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) is much more straightforward to use and learn than C-like languages such as Java, C++ or C#.

ColdFusion Services

We offer a full range of ColdFusion development services, including CFML coding, CFCs, Custom Tags etc. Our comprehensive Custom Tag and CFC libraries are a key part of our service offering as they accelerate development and reduce programming errors. We aim to be a centre of excellence in ColdFusion development in New Zealand. To achieve this we must not only have the best programming skills, but also the best practices in related disciplines – database design, SQL, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, source control, change management etc.

ColdFusion Products

Our web Portal and related CRM and B2B products are all developed in ColdFusion and we would encourage anyone using our services to use these as the foundation. This will save time and establish a platform which is supported and maintainable in the long term.

Related Architectures

Fusebox

All DBS web development is compliant with the "Fusebox" development methodology, as described at www.fusebox.org

This is an "open source" methodology for the development of structured web applications. It promotes standards for code modularity and re-use, extensibility, security, and team developments.

Fusebox solves a hidden problem which affects many web applications, namely lack of pre-determined structure in the source code. By providing a standard structure, Fusebox helps to lower maintenance costs and reduce learning curves for new programmers.

Object Orientation

DBS code libraries include a number of reusable objects, implemented as ColdFusion Components (CFCs). While increasingly using Object Oriented techniques, we have been careful to optimise maintainability and backwards compatibility, to avoid “component gridlock”.

AJAX

AJAX provides a solution to a serious limitation of the browser as a user interface, namely the need to submit and redisplay an entire page in order to refresh parts of the page in response to user inputs.

Take a simple example: a web page which requires the user to select a region (e.g. Northland, Auckland, Waikato etc.) then a district (e.g. Auckland City, North Shore, Manukau) etc. To be sure the user only selects districts which belong to the region they have selected, the traditional page-at-a-time web application would need to refresh the whole page once they have selected the region in order to bring back its set of districts. How tedious. Using AJAX (which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) the web developer can refresh the district selection immediately the user selects a region, without refreshing the rest of the page. This results in a dramatic improvement in performance and usability.

AJAX has become rapidly accepted as a standard web technology, and is heavily used by Google in their GMail, Gmaps and other products. If your web application doesn’t use AJAX it soon will, or will be noticeably behind the pace.

DBS has carefully researched AJAX and we have adapted CFAJAX (the ColdFusion implementation of AJAX) to work with our Portal. As with all new technologies we take on, we have worked to simplify and standardise our implementation, so that it is easy to customise and deploy across the range of customers and web sites we support.

About ColdFusion

ColdFusion was the one of the first scripting languages available for the development of dynamic, data-driven web pages and is the language behind literally millions of web pages around the world today.

ColdFusion is now in its ninth major release Coldfusion was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc in 2005, along with the Macromedia Flash, Flex and Dreamweaver family of web development tools.

Visit www.adobe.com or Wikipedia for more information.



Java on Steroids

ColdFusion is "Java on Steroids". Being Java-based, ColdFusion delivers all the portability and scalability benefits of Java, but is much simpler to use and easier to learn. Why sacrifice developer productivity for the sake of performance when you can have both?


Simple Change Management

Managing change in ColdFusion is exceedingly easy, which enhances our responsiveness to customer needs, and results in straightforward and very rapid implementation cycles.


ColdFusion Sites

ColdFusion enjoys enormous popularity worldwide and in New Zealand. High-profile CF web sites in New Zealand include the recently re-launched New Zealand Herald Web Site and the official NZ Government travel information web site, the award-winning NewZealand.com.

N.B. These sites were NOT developed by DBS. We cite them simply as examples of the ColdFusion user base in NZ.