ColdFusion debabbled
To continue my discussion of server-side scripting languages, this week covers one that I know well, Adobe's ColdFusion. Just to review, a server-side scripting language is a programming language (scripts are essentially just short programs) that generates data-driven web pages on the web server.What is ColdFusion?
Originally developed by Allaire, ColdFusion was later bought by Macromedia and more recently became part of Adobe. Like PHP and ASP, ColdFusion allows you to integrate code with web pages, allowing you to pre-process (that is, prior to the web page being sent to the user) complex tasks and data requests, effectively giving your website the power of a software application.
What's in it for me?
The relative advantages of any given web scripting language are often more opinion than fact, and I personally have used ColdFusion for years, so let me start with a warning that what follows is mostly my opinion. With it's recent purchase by Adobe, ColdFusion has a number of useful built-in features, most notably the addition of integrated functions to create PDF documents. Another plus of ColdFusion is that it's relatively easy to learn, as it uses tags that look very similar to HTML. For example, let's say you have a variable, called myVar, and you want to add one to it. In PHP, that might look something like:
