Inside Coldfusion MX

Now that you've been introduced to ColdFusion and you've learned a bit about application development, let's begin to talk about writing ColdFusion code. Developing ColdFusion applications is easy because it's an easy-to-learn programming language. ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) is a tag-based language, much like Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). CFML is an easy-to-understand language because it is made up of intuitively named tags.

CFML is not only made up of tags, but also includes functions. There are currently more than 100 ColdFusion tags and more than 270 ColdFusion functions. The ColdFusion tags enable developers to interact with the datasources that feed their applications. They then manipulate that data to display variable values.

By now, you know that ColdFusion is made up of the application server and CFML. One without the other does you little good. Because ColdFusion templates are interpreted by the ColdFusion Application Server, you need to make sure that you're developing code on a machine that is running a web server and the ColdFusion Application Server.

In this chapter, and those to follow, we dig deeper into ColdFusion application development. We start with a discussion of some basic ColdFusion development concepts and basic CFML. We then begin to look at writing values to the web browser and finally move on to examples and scenarios that help you master the basics of interacting with databases.