ColdFusion MX

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When Macromedia merged with the Allaire Corporation in 2001, it added this extremely powerful tool to its arsenal of design applications. ColdFusion gives Flash developers and Dreamweaver designers the ability to create technically sophisticated Web and Intranet applications, and the inclusion of ColdFusion MX makes it easier and more intuitive for nonprogrammers to do so.

The relationship between ColdFusion MX and other Macromedia Studio products is now so closely integrated that it's possible you have already been using ColdFusion features in your Flash movies or Dreamweaver sites without realizing it. Dreamweaver, in particular, makes it easy to create basic ColdFusion applications without knowing much about ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) or how ColdFusion Server works.

The ColdFusion chapters in this section are designed to take you beyond the basics to help you understand what goes on in a ColdFusion application. You learn how it works with other Macromedia tools, and how you can use it to add functionality to the Web sites you build. Some of the examples will be shown in the context of the Dreamweaver interface, but most will be displayed as plain text and code to help you understand how ColdFusion's programming language works behind the scenes in your application. Based on the restrictions of this books size we won't go into a lot of detail on using Dreamweaver intuitive tools (refer to the help menu for that) but we will be taking a programming approach to work with fairly advanced concepts like complex variables and functions by the end of the section. It will build to the point that you work with some Flash Remoting in the last chapter. If you came to ColdFusion from a design background, don't worry. Although ColdFusion is a different tool than Dreamweaver, Flash, or Fireworks, it was designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind.

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