ColdFusion has three basic components: the server, the administrator interface, and ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). The server is the central element because without the capability to serve pages, the other two elements are useless. The ColdFusion server runs side by side with a web server. As the web server displays pages, the ColdFusion server watches for ColdFusion pages (pages with the .cfm extension). ColdFusion pages contain a mixture of standard HTML and CFML. If the web server receives a request for a page with a .cfm extension, it hands that request off to the ColdFusion server. The ColdFusion server then retrieves the appropriate page, processes it (a process known as preprocessing), retrieves any data that it requests from a database, and then turns all the resulting data into pure HTML. It then hands that HTML back to the web server and the web server sends the data to the client for display in the client's browser (see Figure 17.1.). Figure 17.1. The ColdFusion server preprocesses any CFM pages and then sends the resulting HTML back to the web server.
During the preprocessing task, the ColdFusion server can do several things beyond just processing HTML, including
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