Coldfusion Overview

Often heard about the web development languange 'coldfusion' and not understood what it is? If so then keep reading to find out more about Coldfusion.

The primary characteristic feature of ColdFusion is its associated scripting language, ColdFusion Mark-up Language (CFML), which is similar to ASP.NET, or PHP and resembles HTML in syntax. "ColdFusion" is primarily used with "CFML", but there are additional CFML application servers besides ColdFusion, and that ColdFusion supports programming languages other than CFML, such as server-side Actionscript and embedded scripts that can be written in a JavaScript-like language, known as CFScript.

ColdFusion is most often used for data-driven web sites or intranets, but can also be used to generate remote services such as SOAP web services or Flash remoting.

ColdFusion can also handle asynchronous events such as SMS and instant messaging via its gateway interface, available in ColdFusion MX 7 Enterprise Edition.

ColdFusion has the ability of running in a .NET environment which means it has most of the capabilities of asp.NET such as accessing the active directory and interacting with an exchange server.

The latest edition of ColdFusion offers many built-in functions which offer advanced manipulation of images.

ColdFusion provides a number of value-added services out of the box. Among them:

• Conversion from HTML to PDF and FlashPaper
• Client-side code generation, especially for form widgets and validation
• Platform-independent database querying via ODBC or JDBC
• Data retrieval from common enterprise systems such as Active Directory, LDAP, POP, HTTP, FTP, Microsoft Exchange Server
• Client and server cache management
• Session, client, and application management
• File indexing and searching service based on Verity K2
• XML parsing, querying, and validation
• Server clustering
• GUI administration
• Task scheduling