Introduction

ColdFusion is a Web application language and server released by Allaire in 1995. The product has continued to rise in popularity, due largely to the intuitive language structure and user-friendly development environment. Originally, ColdFusion was comprised of two key parts: ColdFusion Studio, which is used to build a site, and ColdFusion Server, which serves the pages to the user. Over the years, however, ColdFusion has undergone some dramatic changes.

Many of the changes that have occurred in ColdFusion reflect its ownership. In 2001, it was purchased by Macromedia who then merged with Adobe in 2005. When it became part of Macromedia's line of products, Dreamweaver replaced ColdFusion Studio for development of Web applications. Additional changes occurred when ColdFusion MX 6.0 was rebuilt on the Java 2 platform, and again when ColdFusion MX 7.0 provided the features of Flash-based and Xforms-based Web forms and a report builder that provided output in PDF, Flash Paper, and other formats.

Even elements relating to the languages used in ColdFusion have changed during these transitions. ColdFusion has its own page markup language, called ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). When ColdFusion became ColdFusion MX (admittedly now sounding like a cold medicine), the language was extended to support object-orientated programming (OOP). In addition to CFML, there is a server-side scripting language called CFScript, which can be used to embed custom scripts into ColdFusion Web pages. CFScript is similar to JavaScript, and provides extended functionality to ColdFusion Web applications.

In addition to having its own language, ColdFusion offers...