Introducing CFML


When ColdFusion was introduced in the last chapter, I mentioned that one of the elements was the ColdFusion Markup Language, frequently referred to as CFML. CFML is a tag-based programming language, very similar to HTML in that the functionality that the ColdFusion server is expected to perform is indicated by a start tag like <CFOUTPUT> and an end tag like </CFOUTPUT>. Anything inside those tags is processed by the ColdFusion engine and everything else is left up to the web server application. This means that in the following snippet of code

<B><CFOUTPUT>Hello World!</CFOUTPUT><B>


the ColdFusion engine would output the text Hello World! and the web server would bold the text. This might seem a little silly at this point because the web server could just as easily handle the output of the text, but as you'll see later in the chapter, the power of ColdFusion goes way beyond creating simple text.

Note

You'll notice throughout this book that when I refer to tags, I type them in all caps. This is not a requirement because ColdFusion is not case sensitive (for example, <cfoutput> is the same as <CFOUTPUT>), but is merely a coding style that I use. By doing this, I am able to easily distinguish my CF tags from other non-ColdFusion text.


Tip

If you're not into writing your own code, don't worry. Dreamweaver is an excellent development tool for the ColdFusion platform and it writes the code for you.




Special Edition Using Macromedia Studio 8
Special Edition Using Macromedia Studio 8
ISBN: 0789733854
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 337

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