Understanding Web Applications

Web sites are powered by Web servers, and Web servers do just that: they serve. Web browsers make requests, and Web servers fulfill those requests—they serve up the requested information to the browser. These are usually HTML files, as well as the other file types discussed previously.

And that’s really all Web servers do. In the grand scheme of things, Web servers are actually pretty simple applications—they sit and wait for requests that they attempt to fulfill as soon as they arrive. Web servers don’t let you interact with a database; they don’t let you personalize Web pages; they don’t let you process the results of a user’s form submission. They do none of that; all they do is serve pages.

So how do you extend ...

Get Adobe ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit, Volume 1: Getting Started now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.