Programming ColdFusion

Preface

I first started using ColdFusion in early 1996. I had been hired by a company to build and manage both their external web site and their intranet. Both started as completely static sites, with a few Perl scripts thrown in to handle such tasks as emailing HTML form submissions. But it was only a matter of time before I was asked to add some dynamic content—the request was to “web enable” our corporate address book, which was stored in a Microsoft Access database. My first reaction was to develop the application in Perl. However, at the time, building an application like this in NT Perl (all of our web servers were NT-based) wasn’t feasible, so I began looking for other solutions.

I first tried a product called DB Web, from a company named Aspect Software that had just been acquired by Microsoft. After a bit of experimentation, I realized that DB Web wasn’t what I was looking for. It was more of a tool for querying data from Microsoft Access databases (it wrote VB code on the back end) than a real application development platform. (As a side note, Microsoft stopped supporting DB Web shortly after I evaluated it and rereleased it as Active Server Pages (ASP) a few months later.)

Frustrated, I decided to look into another product I had been hearing about on a web development discussion list. The product was Allaire’s ColdFusion (Cold Fusion at the time), a rapid application development platform for creating and deploying dynamic server-based web applications.^[1] Within hours of downloading the trial version of the software, I had created a proof-of-concept for the corporate address book application.

Looking back, it is almost funny to imagine that I fell in love with a language that had just over 30 language elements in the 1.5 release. At the time, though, ColdFusion had enough power to handle any web programming task thrown my way. And as the tasks have become more complex, ColdFusion has kept pace. Today, those initial 30 language elements have proliferated to over 335. Each new release of ColdFusion contains features and functionality that seem to show up just as I find myself needing or wanting them.

Audience

This book is for anyone who is interested in learning more about ColdFusion, but it is especially aimed at web developers who are designing and building web applications with ColdFusion. I hope this book will help you become proficient with ColdFusion, and that you find it as powerful, easy to program with, and productive as I do.

If you are a beginning web developer, without any programming experience, you may find that the book moves quite quickly through the basics of ColdFusion. Before you start to learn ColdFusion, you should have some experience with web page creation, including a solid understanding of HTML. After that, if you focus on the examples provided in the early chapters and do a lot of experimenting with the code while you are reading, you should be able to learn ColdFusion with this book.

For intermediate developers who already have some web programming experience, this book is the perfect place to learn ColdFusion and get up to speed quickly. You’ll learn about the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), which is ColdFusion’s tag-based language for embedding dynamic content in web pages. This book provides examples that use CFML to implement all the standard web tasks, such as processing form data, performing database queries, and handling session data, so you should be up and running with ColdFusion in no time.

And if you are an advanced ColdFusion developer, you’ll find this book loaded with strategies, hints, tips, and tricks that you can apply to your own projects. I’ve tried to include all the useful ColdFusion tidbits that I’ve discovered over the years, so that you can benefit from my experience. The book also includes reference material on all CFML tags and functions, so that you can have this information at your fingertips while you are programming.

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^[1] Early in 2001, Allaire and Macromedia announced plans to merge, with the combined company using the Macromedia name. Although the merger closed before this book went to press, the Allaire name is still being used in conjunction with ColdFusion, so that’s what I’m going to use throughout this book. Besides, I’ve been working with ColdFusion for so long now, calling it “Macromedia ColdFusion” is going to require breaking a longstanding habit!