Cold Fusion

[Master With Broken Hands]

What is it please ?

[The-Last-Escape]

When people talk about ColdFusion, they could be referring to a couple of things. They could mean the ColdFusion Markup Language, a tag-based language that you can use to create data-driven Web sites. But it's also the ColdFusion Application Server, which translates the tags, talks to the database, and returns HTML to the Web browser.

 

Internally, ColdFusion works similarly to other hypertext preprocessors. The application server recognizes ColdFusion markup, denoted by <cf, processes this code, and performs any necessary operations. Then it returns the result in HTML. There are, of course, a number of technologies that do this, such as PHP, ASP, CGI, JSP, and so forth. If you're familiar with these languages, there are a number of reasons to choose ColdFusion for making dynamic Web applications.

 

ColdFusion Is Easy to Learn

For one thing, ColdFusion is an easy language to learn. Because it is tag-based, like HTML, it will be familiar to newer programmers. ColdFusion also comes with its own Web-based administration system that makes it convenient to manage your sites. This system, known as the ColdFusion Administrator, is a Web application itself written in ColdFusion. From within the administrator, you can perform a number of tasks that help make deployment and maintenance of your applications easy. Here are just some of the things that you can do in a few mouse clicks:

 

Create searchable document directories that are instantly available to your ColdFusion applications. Search Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, HTML, XML and PDF documents, and more with the built-in Verity K2 engine.

 

Manage all of your ODBC and OLEDB datasources. Verify connections, update usernames and passwords, and connect string attributes.

 

Ease server monitoring with MIB support and sophisticated log-file filtering. New with ColdFusion 5, you can create and deploy server probes to monitor the health of your server.

 

Create ColdFusion Archive (CAR) files to wrap entire applications for easy backup and deployment.

 

Manage server access with sandbox security, allowing for multiple developers to coexist in protected environments on the same ColdFusion server.

 

No other Web programming language comes with such a tool.

 

Adobe, formally Macromedia ColdFusion is the leading cross-platform Web application server that gives you the fastest way to build and deploy scalable web systems.

 

ColdFusion enables you to incorporate live data into dynamically created web pages. For example, with ColdFusion your online store can actually deal with real-time inventory levels, enabling you to notify your customers of any out of stock items.

 

Benefit from these features:

 

Rapid Development Build complex applications quickly and easily.

Scalable Deployment Deliver reliable, complex sites and applications with load balancing and fail-over.

Open Integration Use the full range of Internet and enterprise technologies.

Complete Security Control Access your servers for development and administration and use advanced security features to protect applications during run-time.

ColdFusion application processing

When a user clicks a 'Submit' button on a form or a hypertext link on a page, the user's web browser sends an HTTP request to the web server via the Internet or an intranet.

The web server processes the data submitted by the client and calls up the appropriate .cfm page through a server API.

ColdFusion reads the data from the client and processes the CFML in the page. Based on CFML, the server interacts with database servers, file systems and mail servers.

ColdFusion dynamically generates an HTML web page.

The HTML page is returned to the user's browser.

Making .cfm pages

ColdFusion tags (CFML: ColdFusion Markup Language) that allow ColdFusion functionality are incorporated into normal HTML pages.

 

The following code shows a simple ColdFusion example:

 

This ColdFusion Markup... ...results in this HTML output.

<CFQUERY NAME="ProductList"  DATASOURCE="CompanyDB">

  SELECT ProductName, Price FROM Products

</CFQUERY>

<HTML>

<BODY>

<H1>Company X products</H1>

<CFOUTPUT QUERY="ProductList">

#ProductName# ?#Price#

</CFOUTPUT>

</BODY>

</HTML>

<HTML>

<BODY>

<H1>Company X products</H1>

Mower ?80.00

Drill ?45.00

Jeans ?30.00

Goods ?25.00

</BODY>

</HTML>

 

 

By using CFML tags, data such as 'ProductName' and 'Price' can be retrieved from a database so that any pricing changes made to the database are automatically reflected in the web pages.

 

SQL statements are embedded into pages to interact with the database. For instance, the web pages could reduce the number of items in stock when an item is purchased.

 

With standard HTML the actual web page would have to be manually edited to reflect any price changes.

 

More information

ColdFusion also features the Verity search engine, mail processing from within your pages, secure transaction processing and password authentication.

 

All these features give you the ability to develop dynamic, interactive web applications in the minimum amount of time. From online stores with real-time inventory control (no more customers ordering out of stock items) to Human Resources intranets that reflect live information from an HR database, ColdFusion brings your web applications to life.

 

 

 

 

[obsidian]

Macromedia web development language/framework:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColdFusion

http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/