Extending CF with Other Technologies

ColdFusion comes with built-in support for integration with databases, email systems, Internet protocols, and more. In addition, ColdFusion can be extended using Custom Tags, User-Defined Functions (UDFs), and ColdFusion Components.

Custom Tags were reviewed in Chapters 28 and 29, UDFs in Chapter 30, and CFCs in Chapter 31.

Custom Tags, UDFs, and CFCs are used to encapsulate and reuse ColdFusion functionality. For most applications this is all the extensibility ever needed, but occasionally it may be necessary to interact with external systems, and so ColdFusion provides several ways to accomplish this:

• Access to Java

• Access to COM

• Access to CORBA

• Ability to write CFX extensions in Java and C++