# ColdFusion Features

ColdFusion provides a comprehensive set of features that enable:

- Rapid development
- Scalable deployment
- Open integration
- Complete security

## Rapid development

The ColdFusion development platform enhances the speed and ease of development through the following features:

- A tag-based server scripting language that is powerful and intuitive.
- Two-way visual programming and database tools.
- Remote interactive debugging for quickly identifying and fixing problems.
- Web application wizards to automate common development tasks.
- Source control integration to enable team development.
- Secure file and database access via HTTP for remote development.
- A tag-based component architecture for flexible code reuse.

## Scalable deployment

ColdFusion delivers a high-performance platform for application deployment through the following features:

- A multi-threaded service architecture that scales across processors.
- Database connection pooling to optimize database performance.
- Just-in-time page compilation and caching to accelerate page request processing.
- Dynamic load balancing for scalable performance in a cluster environment (Enterprise Edition only).
- Automatic server recovery and fail-over for high availability (Enterprise Edition only).

## Open integration

ColdFusion integrates with new and legacy technologies through the following features:

- Database connectivity using native database drivers (Enterprise Edition only), ODBC, or OLE-DB.
- Embedded support for full text indexing and searching.
- Standards-based integration with directory, mail, HTTP, FTP, and file servers.
- Connectivity to distributed object technologies including CORBA (Enterprise Edition only), COM (Windows Enterprise Edition only), Java objects and EJBs.
- Open extensibility with C/C++ and Java.

## Complete security

ColdFusion provides a foundation for building secure applications through the following features:

- Integration with existing authentication systems including Windows NT domain and LDAP directory servers, and proprietary user and group databases.
- Advanced access control so that server administrators can control developers' access to files and data sources.
- Support for existing database security.
- Server sandbox security for protecting multiple applications on a single server (Enterprise Edition only).
- Support for existing Web server authentication, security, and encryption.

For detailed information on security, refer toAdministering ColdFusion Server. Also, for the latest publications from Allair on security, visit the Security Zone at http://www.allaire.com/developer/securityzone/. For a complete feature list and more detailed information, refer to the ColdFusion product pages, http://www.allaire.com/coldfusion.