For long ColdFusion has been known as a web app server (which is true, for that matter). But recently I was proposed a challenge. A customer already had CF8 Enterprise to deliver their intranet and also a B2B system. But to the date there was no real integration between the B2B system and the company’s ERP. A daily database sync was pretty much all the integration there was. The customer also didn’t want to buy the ERP’s middleware server (it had an outraging cost for what it did, I must admit). So I was asked if I could link the systems using CF8.
Did some digging on the ERP information and communication structure, analyzed some processes, did some architecture design and a few weeks later I was able to provide a multi-layer integration system for the customer. I’ve used several functionalities on ColdFusion like XML generation and validation and gateways. Because I didn’t want to hack the database directly I managed to get all the requests routed into the ERP by creating a custom gateway in Java. Ok,ok, so it was not JUST ColdFusion but I only used the Java to handle things on the ERP side. All information mapping and transformation where actually done in ColdFusion.
So maybe this isn’t the most compelling stuff I could post here but I just wanted to share my experience and demonstrate that ColdFusion is becoming an all-purpose application server and not just something for “web pages”. By the way, I also have some database replication scripts entirely running on ColdFusion 