Summary

The growth of the Internet has increased many-fold because of its ease of availability and the use of various technologies. As the Web grew, a way to transfer data from clients to servers was needed. CGI is a standard enabling external applications or programs to communicate with Web servers. A major limitation of CGI is that applications run as separate executables, which requires a lot of resources. Server-side scripting languages were developed to address the need for dynamic Web page interaction without using C, C++, or Visual Basic. Macromedia CFML is one of these languages. ColdFusion allows developers to build dynamic and interactive Web sites. It uses a tag-based language, integrates well with databases and e-mail servers, uses Web server APIs, and has a scalable architecture.

In the next chapter, you'll be introduced to CFML and various CFML tags.