Thread: Introduction to coldfusion

The time will eventually come when you need to work with a database for a website. Using a database greatly enhances your ability to add and remove content, and all in all it requires less work to set up.

Take this website for example. With its many articles without the use of a database a separate web page would have to be made for each and every article. Sure you could automate things with SSI but you would still have to make a separate page for each article.

With a database this is different, you can simply make a single page to view all of your articles. You simply pass a variable in the link such as ID=2 and that tells the database to serve article number 2. How to do this will be explained in this article.

There are 3 main programming languages used to access databases. PHP, which is normally found on unix/linux platforms, ASP, which is a creation of Microsoft and is found mostly on NT platforms, and Cold Fusion(CF), which is found mostly on NT platforms as well.

This article will show you how to use Cold Fusion to access a database from a website and use it to display information.

About Cold Fusion

Cold Fusion was created as a commercial product by the Allaire Corporation. As a commercial product it has some features different from other Server Side Scripting Languages. The first major difference is that Cold Fusion scripts do not have to display their source code like every other scripting language, it is possible to run encrypted versions of the scripts. This allows for individuals to sell their own scripts without fear of piracy, however it has the side effect of stemming the flow of free open source CF scripts for use by the learning webmaster. The second major difference is that Cold Fusion costs money. A server side scripting language works with an interpreter. Depending on the extension of the filename to be served, .php .asp or .cfm, the server will first send the file to an interpreter which is what dynamically generates your page. So to use these languages you need to install them on your server. PHP is free, ASP is free, but CF costs money, and that may be the reason why it is growing only slowly. However most NT hosting packages do already include Cold Fusion so for the person who does not own their own server this pricing difference will not have much affect.

As to the language itself, I have worked with both ASP and PHP before and it is my opinion that Cold Fusion is the easiest to learn and use.

Source

Code:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/cold-fusion-tutorial/

once I thought I would learn it, never had chance

Originally Posted by manik

once I thought I would learn it, never had chance

So are you not free these days ? just go ahead and learn it

Well cold fusion seems to be intresting I will start learning it

Nice article on cold fusion it's HTML and ColdFusion tags can exist together within a document that is requested from a web server.

Hi...
i read your post and about cold fusion you provide such a good article... such a good information you provide on it.... Thanks for sharing the post....

Nice articles thank for sharing

I read this post

Really helpful article...Thanks for share....

good article thanks for sharing

The Cold fusion is a tag-based programming language supports database access in a web server environment; that's just one of several features that make it a good choice for programming.Thanks for sharing info.