coldfusion basics by Raghuram Reddy

Hi,

welcome to the world of Adobe coldfusion :)
The ColdFusion (CF) application server was first developed in 1995 by JJ Allaire
After that macromedia acquired it and released with added features.
December 12, 2005: Adobe acquired its main rival Macromedia in a stock swap valued at about $3.4 billion adding: Adobe ColdFusion.
Coldfusion has Java enabled features , friendly tags and functions which made the coldfusion robust.
coldfusion is a server side tag based language for developing rich internet applications.

Here is some of the frequently asked questions and answers for the coldfusion beginners

1. How to install Coldfuison ?

Just go through the following adobe link which will explain the exact procedure to install the coldfusion :

Coldfusion MX7 Installation

2. How to display the contents in the browser using coldfusion ?

First(Hello world) Coldfusion Program :

1. create a new file and save the file under
C:\JRun4\servers\cfusion\cfusion-ear\cfusion-war
folder with .cfm or .cfml extension.

eg : C:\JRun4\servers\cfusion\cfusion-ear\cfusion-war\hello.cfm

2. Type some text( say hello world ) in the page and save that file.

3. Open the browser and type the following url in the address bar.

http://127.0.0.1:8300/hello.cfm

you can view the output hello world on the browser which you have typed in the hello.cfm file.

4. Just like System.out.println in java, and printf in C language,
in coldfusion we have outputting tag i.e., <cfoutput> hello world Note : we will use the cfoutput tag whenever we need to display the dynamic values/content to the browser. For static data, we can directly type the things, so coldfusion server treats it as static data and sends the data to the browser as it is in HTML format.

5. you can output the same thing using coldfusion scripting, here is the sample code for it.

<cfscript>
WriteOutput("hello world!");
</cfscript>

Note : coldfusion scripts will execute much faster than the tags.
If you got performance issues, just go for cfscript.

3.How to Learn Coldfusion?

Adobe provided a excellent documentation on coldfusoin tags and functions.
What all you need to do is, just start reading the tags and execute the examples which Adobe has provided in the following link.

Adobe Coldfusion MX7 Documentation(Tags, Functions and Sample Code)

Type the above link in the browser, click on the 'CFML Reference' ,
which is in the left side of the page.
It will expand and displays coldfusion tags,coldfusion functions links.
click on coldfusion tags and keep reading, practice the example.

Once you became comfortable with Coldfusion MX7, you can go for updated version Coldfusion 8.
Coldfusion 8 is having additional features like
1. ajaxified functionality(auto suggest
2. customized menu,button,layouts)
3. PDF merge
4. Exchange server enhanced features
5. And the performance is increased much compared with the earlier version.(For an example cfset tag is 10 times faster in cf8)
For Coldfusion 8 installations and documentation click the following link

Adobe Coldfusion 8 Installation, Documentation on Tags, Functions and Sample Code

All the best !!!
cf9 and coldfusion builder about to release on aug 4th.
we will share more details in coming days.

until then
keep mailing to raghuramgreddy@gmail.com for queries
Have a great day
Thank you,
Raghuram Reddy Gottimukkula
Adobe Certified Coldfusion Developer
Bangalore(India)