Beginner Guide to Coldfusion

Who is this guide for?

If you who know enough HTML to build a simple web page but want to be able to do more than just static HTML. You must also want to learn a web programming language that is easy, familiar to HTML and powerful. Then Coldfusion is for you!

What is the purpose of a web programming language?

I use web programming languages such as Coldfusion to get data from a database and display it on a web page. Naturally you also need a way to insert and update that data which Coldfusion does with equal ease.

What is Coldfusion?

CFML or Coldfusion Markup Language is a tag based web programming language that at first glance might look quite a bit like HTML, but under the hood is a feature rich programming language. It was developed by a company called Allaire and had it's first release in July 1995. In 1998 Cold Fusion gets a very minor name change, the space between Cold and Fusion gets removed becoming Coldfusion. In 2001 Macromedia bought Allaire and took over development of the language. The following year Coldfusion server becomes Java-Based forever changing the way people view the language. In February 2005 Coldfusion MX 7 is launched with a whole new set of features and enterprise-level capabilities.

Coldfusion pages end with the extension .cfm unlike HTML pages that end in either .htm or .html or in some cases with .shtml, either way though what the browser is given after a Coldfusion template is executed is html relatively indistinguishable from a hand coded HTML page. CFML looks similar to HTML in that its tags are enclosed in the same angle brackets < > that HTML tags are enclosed with, also all tag names start with a cf and most CFML tags have both a start and end tag for example:

<cfstarttag> </cfendtag>

The simple explanation is that the Coldfusion server reads the template and looks for tags beginning with cf or variables and functions that are surrounded with pound (#) signs. The Coldfusion code is then processed by the Server and the resulting HTML output is then given to the web server, which then sends it to the browser of the person who requested the page {add illustration}, just like magic! Any HTML or other text on the pages is simply returned untouched and unprocessed. This is a little bit of an over simplification as there are a number of things that happen along the way but will only serve to complicate matters at this point.

I have created a number of tutorials that will take you through the first steps to creating a dynamic Coldfusion powered website. Each tutorial introduces one or more new tags and then demonstrates those tags in use and builds upon tags introduced previously. I would suggest you start with my beginner series of tutorials and work your way through sequentially.