Chapter 11: ColdFusion and Dreamweaver MX

Overview

ColdFusion, once the brainchild of the Allaire Corporation, now belongs to Macromedia, the creators of Dreamweaver MX. Since its inception many years ago, ColdFusion has provided the web developer an easy-to-use, powerful platform on which to build dynamic websites without being locked into the Microsoft suite of products. In fact, ColdFusion was born before ASP (Active Server Pages), PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), and JSP (JavaServer Pages) and has added more and more power through its growing years. In fact, the latest version of ColdFusion, ColdFusion MX, was completely rewritten to run on a J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) platform, offering even more cross-platform coverage and compatibility.Now that Macromedia guides the growth of this incredibly powerful web development platform, it's no wonder that Dreamweaver MX has a special affection for ColdFusion. Dreamweaver MX provides many features to aid your development of ColdFusion applications. We'll cover those features in this chapter, as well as introduce you to the ColdFusion application server and its language.