ColdFusion: With ColdFusion, you can build and deploy powerful web applications and services with far less training time and fewer lines of code than ASP, PHP, and JSP. Version 7.0 introduces powerful new application services including rich Flash forms generation, structured reports, and dynamic generation of printable documents. Coupled with version 6.1’s simplified installation and migration, updated key features, and increased in runtime performance, these features open up a new world of applications beyond the browser.
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What is ColdFusion?
ColdFusion is a program based on the CFMX programming language that builds and deploys powerful web applications and services. With proven tag-based methodology, ColdFusion’s features allow web developers to easily harness the power of the Java Platform to deliver powerful Internet applications to millions of people worldwide. ColdFusion is a server side language, which is executed by a ColdFusion application server. It works by executing CFM templates (which is a mixture of HTML and ColdFusion instructions) to return normal HTML to the requesting browser. The ColdFusion MX Enterprise software suite provides all the necessary software to create large-scale websites, applications, and hosting environments, and is available for either a stand-alone installation for web developers or for industry-level deployment on J2EE application servers.
The true power of ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML)
The core functionality of ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) is centered on the use of tags. These server scripting tags give ColdFusion its speedy development applications for the web. CFML is quite simple to learn, but is powerful enough to handle even the most complex and demanding web applications. Processed entirely on the server, CFML uses syntax closely resembling that of HTML and XML. CFML consists of two primary language elements: tags and functions. Tags let you perform operations such as accessing a database. Functions can return data and do other operations like retrieving the system date. Tags, functions and operators make up expressions. Building expressions in ColdFusion is easy and can include simple as well as complex elements. The ways in which these expressions and elements are used determine how ColdFusion processes your program.
Is ColdFusion easy to learn?
Out of the many different methods used to develop and build web applications, pages, and services, ColdFusion is by far the easiest to learn and use. For ColdFusion 7.0, Macromedia has created a helpful ‘Getting Started Experience’ interface that gives the new user access to tutorials, whitepapers, topic index, and even two sample applications to play with.
There is no other language or product as well suited to web developers as ColdFusion. Easy-to-use visual tools and an intuitive server scripting environment allow new users to easily pick up the CFML language.
Windows, UNIX, or Linux…which Should I Use To Run My Website?
Macromedia ColdFusion MX supports most operating systems including Windows, Unix, Linux, IBM AIX and HP-UX. Below is a list of operating system versions and system requirements for the latest ColdFusion version:
Windows OS Intel Pentium processor or higher 256 MB RAM but 512 MB is highly recommended 400 MB of hard disk space available Works on MS Windows 98 / ME / NT 4 / SP6A / 2000 /SP3 / XP/ 2003
Linux OS Intel Pentium processor or higher 256 MB RAM but 512 MB is highly recommended 400 MB of hard disk space available Red Hat Linux 7.2 / 7.3 / 8.0 / 9 / AS & ES 2.1 / AS & ES 3.0 SuSE Linux 7.2 / 7.3 / or 8X Turbo Linux 8 Server ( Japanese Only)
Unix SPARC, PA-RISC 1.1 / 2.0 / Power 3 processor Sun Solaris 7 / 8 / 9 256 MB RAM but 512 MB is highly recommended 400 MB of hard disk space available HP-UX 11i IBM AIX 5L 4.3 / 3 / 5.1 / 5.2 Apple Mac OS X
What Databases and Web Servers are supported with ColdFusion?
ColdFusion MX supports most major databases including Microsoft SQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2, Sybase and IBM Informix. In addition, CFMX can run on most major web servers including IIS, Apache and Sun One.
What are the differences between the ColdFusion 7.0 editions?
Standard Edition: This edition is for single web application or small workgroup environments. It builds accessible, high-quality rich forms, transforms existing HTML content into PDF or FlashPaper 2 formats, creates structured business reports for workgroup applications, delivers charts and graphs, and increases text searching capabilities.
Enterprise Edition: This edition is ideal for the quickly growing business. It includes all the features of the Standard Edition as well as scalability, performance, and enterprise management capabilities for larger web and business applications. The Enterprise Edition has multi-instance deployment and management, clustering, high-speed enterprise database drivers, server security J2EE packaging and deployment, and high-performance e-mail delivery. Yet the most anticipated feature of this edition is the event gateway, which enables ColdFusion applications to connect to mobile phones and instant messaging.
How does ColdFusion run on application servers?
The ColdFusion MX runtime environment is actually a Java application that takes advantage of the many powerful services in the J2EE platform. What this J2EE platform does is connects the various databases, manages its own security, as well as processes the requests sent in by the application itself. When ColdFusion MX is installed in the J2EE configuration, the compiled infrastructure will be on top of the application server in order to execute the language’s applications. This configuration will allow developers to cultivate and set out pages, as well as manage the MX server settings using the ColdFusion Administrator.
What are the advantages & disadvantages of using custom tags in ColdFusion?
Using custom tags within ColdFusion has its advantages and disadvantages. Custom tags written in CFML primarily try to achieve a simple balance between three aspects; taking argument statements, having body tags begin and end with the appropriate tag, and ensuring proper processing when a beginning tag is encountered by the ColdFusion program. If designed properly, these custom tags will also be able to be called recursively (meaning that it will have the functionality to call itself within the body tag). Although a custom tag in ColdFusion will call a page included the CFinclude tag, the disadvantage is that the code must be recursive, have developed complex functionality, and must be convenient for others (although often times code is not convenient). If creating either a User Defined Function (UDF) or a custom CFML tag, weigh the options carefully, since invoking a UDF requires less system overhead than using a custom tag.
What are the new features for ColdFusion 7.0?
ColdFusion 7.0 brings a whole new level of features to developers. With better web application creation, new server management and deployment options, and a new class of applications, users are able to quickly create powerful Internet applications without spending a lot of time or money.
Macromedia developed the new features to help web developers be more efficient in performing routine tasks such as structured business reporting, Flash-rich forms, and PDF and FlashPaper 2 document generation. ColdFusion Report Builder, a tool that helps users develop detailed business reports, will create sub reports, charts and graphs, automatically generate subtotals, and much more. ColdFusion 7.0 simplifies the form building process with the new Rich Flash and XML Forms capabilities. The new CFDOCUMENT feature eliminates chopping page printing with a single tag that transforms web pages into PDF or FlashPaper 2 formats.
How do I purchase my own copy of ColdFusion?
The ColdFusion MX suite is available directly from Macromedia, local computer software resellers, licensing programs and some web hosts.
Web Browsers And Web Servers – How Do They Work?
Most of us surf the Internet several times a week, if not several times a day. We visit website after website, viewing information, playing games, and occasionally downloading software. The World Wide Web is an incredible spectacle, but none of it would exist without web servers.
Web servers are the backbone of the web, since they are responsible for serving up every web page you see. Most people take the Internet for granted. It takes a lot of work to do something as simple as display a web page. When you clicked on the link to view this article, a series of smaller operations commenced which, while each is small on their own, all fit together to bring you this brilliantly written composition. But how did it work? What actually had to happen to make this text appear in your web browser?
Why don’t we break down what happens when you use a web browser. First, you select a URL to go to, either by typing it into the browser, or clicking a link in an email or webpage. For example, lets assume you go to http://www.jamsoft.biz/about.asp to find more information about the author of this article. You type that into your browser and “abracadabra”, the page appears on your screen.
What actually occurs to bring that page to your screen is a little complicated. I will explain it in two steps, first giving you a brief explanation before giving a more detailed explanation in addition.
For starters, when you typed in the website above, your web browser broke the URL into three different pieces.
The first part is the protocol that the web server should communicate with. In this example, the protocol is “http”. This tells the web browser that you wish to communicate with a web server on port 80, which is the port reserved for web page communications.
The second part of the URL is the server address. In our example, the server address is www.jamsoft.biz . This tells the web browser which server it needs to contact in order to retrieve the information you are looking for. The web browser communicates with a domain name server (DNS) to find out the IP Address for the website. All communications on the Internet use IP Addresses for communications. The website names that we know and love were invented just to make it easier for us to find the websites we need. Imagine if the only way to surf the Internet required that we remember IP Addresses for each site that we visit frequently.
The third part of the URL is the resource you want to see. In our case, we are looking for the page “about.asp”.
The web browser, having found the IP Address it needs by communicating with the name server, then sends a request directly to the web server, using port 80, asking for the file “about.asp”. The web server sends the html for this page back to your web browser, which reads the HTML tags and formats them for viewing on your screen. If there are additional files needed in order to show the web page (like some images, for example) the web browser makes additional requests for each of these. It is not uncommon for a single web page request to trigger 5 or more separate file requests from a web server.
That is a quick explanation of how a web browser communicates with a web server to display the pages you view on the web. While this explanation is complete by itself, a little extra understanding never hurt anyone. To this point, I would like to discuss protocols and IP Addresses in more detail.
As I mentioned, the first part of a URL is usually the protocol that you would like to communicate. The protocol is the special set of rules that end points in a telecommunication connection use when they communicate. The protocol in this case tells us two things. First, part of the protocol definition is which port communications are going to take place on. All Internet communications take place on different ports, and each port typically handles one kind of protocol. For example, HTTP (hypertext protocol) uses port 80 to communicate, whereas FTP (file transfer protocol) communicates on port 21. The second thing the protocol determines is the actual format of the communications. Each protocol has a different purpose, and the communication format is different for each of these specific protocols. The protocol part of a URL tells your web browser what port to communicate on and how the communication is to be formatted.
When describing the process above, I mentioned that all communications on the Internet use IP Addresses to work but I didn’t describe what exactly an IP Address is.
An IP address is a 32-bit numeric address written as four numbers separated by periods. Each of the four numbers can be from 0 to 255, an example would be 192.168.0.5 . The IP address identifies a sender or receiver of information across the Internet. When you request an HTML page or send e-mail the Internet Protocol part of TCP/IP includes your IP address in the message (actually, in each of the packets if more than one is required) and sends it to the IP address of the server to which you wish to communicate. The recipient can see the IP address of the Web page requestor or the e-mail sender and can respond by sending another message using the IP address it received. Each machine on the Internet is assigned a unique IP Address for the purposes of communication.
By using the protocol and the IP Address specified by the first two parts of the URL, your web browser is able to request the information specified in the third part from the correct web server. This is the foundation that the World Wide Web is built on.
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