Lasso: Another CFML competitor

Many of you have probably heard of Lasso, but it was new to me. Which is sad considering that it was first released in 1996 (making it only 1 year younger than ColdFusion). Lasso is a web server language, similar to ColdFusion and PHP. One thing it shares with ColdFusion is that it's tag based, similar to HTML. However, with Lasso you use [] brackets instead of <>. Also, Lasso has a full blown scripting version of the language, for those that prefer coding styles similar to PHP and asp.net.

Another thing that Lasso shares with ColdFusion is that it's not free. In fact, Lasso has similar prices as ColdFusion. They don't have an Enterprise version, but the Professional version costs $649. However, they have a development studio (like ColdFusion used to) that costs $199.

One big difference between Lasso and ColdFusion is platform support. Lasso is cross platform, but it doesn't support as many operating systems as ColdFusion. Also, it doesn't support as many databases out of the box, but you can access any ODBC/JDBC datasource.

I also found it interesting that Lasso has ImageMagick built in to give full image manipulation capabilities, features that are just arriving in ColdFusion 8. Also, Lasso has built-in PDF generation capabilities. I'm not sure if you can work with PDF forms, as will be possible in ColdFusion 8.

An interesting historical footnote about Lasso, is that it was originally based on a C/C++ CGI written by Vince Bonfanti (as referenced in the timeline on their site). For those who don't know, Vince is the President of New Atlanta, makers of BlueDragon (another CFML server language).