| The term ColdFusion has definitely become a popular buzzword in the web community over the last five years or so. If you haven't ever heard of ColdFusion, you might be wondering whether Macromedia has discovered a way to derive incredible amounts of power from a single glass of salt water and has, somehow, done it using the web. Although Macromedia's version of ColdFusion doesn't have anything to do with salt water, it has a lot to do with power and the web. ColdFusion is one of several dynamic server infrastructures (or "platforms") that enables you to extract data from a database and display it in your web pages. Other dynamic platforms include Active Server Pages (ASP), ASP.NET, Java Server Pages (JSP), and Hypertext PreProcessor (PHP). What sets ColdFusion apart from these other platforms is that it is extremely easy to learn, easy to use, and as powerful as any of the other platforms. The developer version of ColdFusion, included with Studio 8, enables you to develop ColdFusion applications and run them strictly on your development machine. This limitation is enforced by the fact that the server can be accessed by only one additional IP addressjust enough for testing. You need a production ColdFusion server to make your applications available on the web. You can either buy and manage your own production ColdFusion server or pay a monthly fee for a hosting servicethe same options you have for an ordinary website. You may also be able to find free ColdFusion hosting, which may be appropriate for testing or for non-critical uses that don't put much stress on the server or demand a lot of bandwidth. In addition, the developer version of ColdFusion can be used as a versatile personal automation tool for tasks. Consider a few examples: For repetitive find-and-replace operations, ColdFusion offers powerful find-and-replace functions that use regular expressions. Note Regular expressions use special placeholder characters such as * and ? to represent unknown characters. Windows Explorer supports regular expressions that use * and ? in searching for filenames.
If you regularly gather the same information from the same web page, or from a number of web pages, you may find that ColdFusion's screen scraping capabilities can automate the whole process. This enables you to gather content easily from other websites that you can use for analysis or (if authorized by the other site owner) for inclusion in your site. To automate emailing with ColdFusion, you can use a database to store and retrieve names, email addresses, and perhaps other information to personalize the messages.
After ColdFusion is installed, there are a few things you need to do before you can start working with it: Take some time to familiarize yourself with the functionality of the ColdFusion Administrator. This tool enables you to configure the various ColdFusion settings and even establish data sources that allow your applications to communicate with databases. Configure a web server to work with ColdFusion. There is a built-in web server that requires no configuration, but it limited to development and doesn't function as a full production web server. Create or obtain a database file, created by a program such as Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, or MySQL. (On the CD accompanying this book, there is a Microsoft Access database, retroscycles.mdb, that you can use for testing.) Typically, you install the database on the ColdFusion server or the development machine on which you are working. Create a System DSN (Data Source Name) so that Windows applications can access the database. You can create the System DSN with the ColdFusion Administrator. If you are not developing on the same machine as that on which ColdFusion is running, you may also need an RDS (Remote Development Services) password to log on to the ColdFusion server. A final, optional step is to configure debugging options by using the ColdFusion Administrator so that you get adequate information when an error occurs to help you in identifying and resolving the issue.
|
