Chapter 47: The Role of ColdFusion in Your Web Sites

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Overview

When Macromedia merged with the Allaire Corporation in 2001, it added an extremely powerful tool to its arsenal of design applications: ColdFusion. ColdFusion gives Flash developers and Dreamweaver designers the ability to create technically sophisticated Web and Intranet applications, and — unlike many programming languages — makes it easier and more intuitive for nonprogrammers to do so.

In fact, the relationship between ColdFusion and other Macromedia Studio products is now so closely integrated that it's possible that you may have already been using ColdFusion features in your Flash movies or Dreamweaver sites without realizing it. Dreamweaver, in particular, makes it easy to create basic ColdFusion applications without having to know much about ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) or how ColdFusion Server works.

All of the chapters in Part VI are designed to take you beyond the basics — to help you understand what goes on in a ColdFusion application, how it works with other Macromedia tools, and how you can use it to add functionality to the Web sites you build. Some of the examples will be shown in the context of the Dreamweaver interface, but most will be displayed as plain text to help you understand how ColdFusion's programming language works behind the scenes in your application.

If you've come to ColdFusion by way of a design background, don't worry. Although ColdFusion is a different tool from Dreamweaver, Flash, or Fireworks, it has still been designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind. Let's begin by looking at some of the basic concepts you'll need to understand before you move into the hands-on examples in the following chapters.

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