Chapter 2. Preparing Your Environment

In this chapter, we take a look at the steps required to get ColdFusion MX up and running on your server or development machine. This is actually a fairly simple process, and it should prove very intuitive if you've ever installed ColdFusion in any of its previous incarnations.

Following an overview of the installation process, we take a look at some out-of-the-box configuration settings that you might want to consider. Chapter 26, "Performance Optimization and Scalability Planning," goes into much greater detail on the tuning of specific hardware and applications for performance.

In addition, we discuss your choices regarding your ColdFusion development environment. We cover the tool of choice for most ColdFusion developers, ColdFusion Studio 5, and the newly introduced development tool, Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX.