ColdFusion Scripts

The computer world consists of numerous scripting languages and application servers of which one of them is ColdFusion. This is an online database management system that was created by J. Allaire and Jeremy Allaire in 2001. However it is now owned by Macromedia and is pretty soon to be acquired by Adobe. It is usually used in the development of most types of computer software and in the production of dynamic web sites. In fact, it could be said that ColdFusion is a scripting language that is similar to Microsoft ASP.NET.

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The specialty of ColdFusion is its scripting language, ColdFusion Markup Language. This is comparable to JSP, PHP or C# while it resembles HTML in syntax. ColdFusion is often referred to as ‘CFML” but today you find additional CFML application servers around, besides ColdFusion. In fact, ColdFusion tends to support some other programming languages besides CFML like server side Actionscript.

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It is the data-driven web sites and intranets that are created using ColdFusion. However some users use ColdFusion as a productivity layer that is above a J2EE platform. Sometimes ColdFusion is used as a middleware in service oriented architecture by generating SOAP, Flash removing or RESTful web services.

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In addition to all this, ColdFusion controls asynchronous events like instant messaging and SMS that is performed through its gateway interface. ColdFusion is also used in several services out of the box like the conversion from HTML to PDF and FlashPaper, in client and server cache management, server clustering, GUI administration through GUI widgets like date pickers and data grids and in session, client and application management.

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ColdFusion is a tool that can run on most Windows and Solaris Web servers. However if you host your own server in-house, you can have the ColdFusion package installed in the same machine. However if you host with an outside provider, you will have to make them buy and install it. In addition to this, you find numerous web providers that provide ColdFusion as an available service. In this case, you will have to pay more; which is worth it considering the amount of time you can save using ColdFusion.

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With ColdFusion installed, you can access your databases using ColdFusion templates which are similar to HTML pages. The advantage here is that instead of creating a separate page for each item, a single template is sufficient to server tons of information dynamically. To use ColdFusion, you need a basic knowledge of HTML and databases and the ability of explaining to your client why it is advantageous to pay more for ColdFusion.

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It is best to use ColdFusion if you have to maintain databases that are seen on the web, if your sites needs constant updates on products or events, if you sell stuff on the web, if you have lots of text based documents to serve up and if your site hosts banner ads or use figures that need computation like product totals and inventory numbers.