A heavyweight semi-finals in the Web page development War

A heavyweight semi-finals in the Web page development War
    
ColdFusion of Allaire and Microsoft's ActiveServerPages (ASP) are two high-end products that compete for market share in the professional Web application development field. In last December, we awarded the champion the integrated development environment (IDE) of ASP-VisualInterDev1.0, because it has excellent database tools and is faster to learn. Microsoft launched Visual InterDev 6.0 last summer. Now, ColdFusion4.0, issued by Allaire, is ready for a semi-finals in this heavy battle.
After using these two development environments, we found that VisualInterDev is prominent in site development process management and script file writing. ColdFusionStudio-the integrated development environment (IDE) designed by Allaire for ColdFusion-is superior in HTML encoding and basic database integration. This time, ColdFusion's improved encoding tools and database connection features make it the final winner.
    
ColdFusion and ASP are composed of two main parts: an IDE and an application server, which work together to generate HTML parsed by the server. The webpage created by IDE is composed of HTML, private tag, and script code. When a user requests a webpage, a dedicated application server evaluates the code and sends the generated HTML page to the user.
    
These two products allow you to manually create webpages using HTML text or a graphical user interface. Either way, you can use a third-party tool to replace the vendor-bound IDE to build Web applications. For example, Drumbeat of ElementalSoftware provides a simple way to create ASP, while NetObject Fusion provides some options for ColdFusion and ASP integration.
    
Development Environment
The core components of ColdFusionStudio and VisualInterDev are their HTML editing capabilities. Both editors provide a qualified WYSIWYG mode based on Microsoft's DHTMLEdit component, which requires you to install InternetExplorer4.01.
We recommend that you avoid using the visual development mode. The code generated in the visual mode of the two products may fully comply with the HTML specification. But even worse, when you press the bold button, VisualInterdev often outputs logic tags like STRONG. The logic tag does not guarantee a specific effect like bold under different browsers.
    
Fortunately, if you manually encode a web page and edit it in visual mode, most of the formats and styles can be saved in these two products. This allows you to use a visual tool for quick editing. However, many developers may insist on using code editing to generate webpages. When coding is involved, the two products seem similar on the surface. They all support original text input, HTML tag tree of the webpage, and navigation of the tag check box, so that you can modify some attributes.