ColdFusion and Node.JS – two great tastes that taste great together!

Fig Leaf Software recently delivered a hybrid ColdFusion – Node.js solution to one of our customers.

We decided to use a hybrid architecture for the following reasons:

1. The customer expressed a preference for using ColdFusion to drive their CMS-based website.
2. The website has several embedded, small AJAX applications that leverage data from an XML-based API that sits behind the customer’s firewall.
3. Java-based app servers (ColdFusion) are particularly well-suited for dynamically assembling and serving web pages.
4. Node.js servers are particularly good at implementing REST APIs and handling large volume, asynchronous data requests for non-cacheable dynamic data.
5. The website/web apps do not require user authentication, therefore session sharing between different app server technologies was not an issue.
6. Sharing the workload between CF and Node gives us more flexibility for scaling up the infrastructure in a more cost-effective manner with options for  potentially off-loading the Node service to cloud platforms such as Heroku.