Chapter 1: Overview of ColdFusion MX

Over the past few years, the World Wide Web has become one of the most accepted mediums for publishing information to the masses. A Web page is a combination of text, images, animation, and multimedia. Web pages are common, with extensive use of e-mail, chat, and search engines.

ColdFusion is a complete development environment that provides the tools to work with Web pages. Unlike HTML, ColdFusion allows you to develop dynamic, data-driven Web sites quickly. The ColdFusion environment also allows you to create forms, enter information, read files, and work with other applications.

Why Use ColdFusion?

The growth of the Web is primarily because of the large amount of Web content and its ease of use. The flipside of this tremendous growth is that a Web site needs to attract users to it. Undoubtedly, a Web site needs to provide good content, but it also needs to do so in a user-friendly and attractive manner. Such a Web site needs to have database connectivity, dynamic data-driven Web pages, user-customized pages, and sophisticated data collection and processing.

ColdFusion was the first Web application server available for Windows NT-based Web servers. Until then, developing dynamic sites was a difficult process. A good working knowledge of UNIX was a prerequisite, and experience with traditional development or scripting languages was necessary. Only experienced programmers could develop customized Web-based applications. But now, ColdFusion enables you to create Web sites that have extensive dynamic features, and it doesn't have a very steep learning curve.

Unlike other server-side scripting languages, ColdFusion scripts do not have to display their source code. It is possible to run encrypted versions of the scripts, which allows individuals to sell their own scripts without fear of piracy.

To develop ColdFusion applications, you don't need any conventional programming language. ColdFusion allows you to create Web applications by extending standard HTML files with input forms, formatting functions, conditional operators, and database commands. The following are the advantages of using ColdFusion to develop Web applications:

• Applications can be developed quickly because coding is not required, other than the use of tags that are similar to HTML tags. This lowers the development costs.

• ColdFusion applications are easy to test because of ColdFusion's powerful debugging tools.

• The ColdFusion language contains a powerful library of functions for convenience.

• ColdFusion applications are easy to maintain. There is no compilation or linking step, and the code files that you create are the files used by ColdFusion.

• ColdFusion comes with the technology to link with almost any type of database.

• ColdFusion applications can be deployed on any platform. This is the most valuable factor for choosing ColdFusion to develop Web applications.

One of the most important features of ColdFusion is the development of applications with dynamic, data-driven Web pages. Static Web pages are made up of text and images; they use HTML formatting tags. Dynamic Web pages pull the needed information from other applications; they don't contain much information on their own. They interact with databases to extract data, which they process and display.

ColdFusion provides a full range of database-interaction functions to create dynamic, data-driven Web pages. It allows you to do the following:

• Integrate databases and files.

• Extract data from existing database applications.

• Execute stored procedures in the databases that support them.

• Execute conditional code to customize responses for specific situations.

• Enhance the standard HTML form capabilities with data-validation functions.

• Populate form elements dynamically.

• Customize the display of date, time, and currency values by using formatting functions.