ColdFusion is an application server and software programming language based on standard HTML which is used to generate dynamic web pages. It is invented by Jeremy and JJ Allaire in 1995, acquired by Macromedia in a merger in April 2001, and then acquired by Adobe System in December 2005. Adobe System sold the current versions of ColdFusion comprise of advanced features for enterprise integration and development of rich internet applications. The exclusive feature of ColdFusion is its associated scripting language, ColdFusion Markup Langauge (CFML), which compares to the scripting components ASP, JSP and PHP in purpose and features, but more closely resembles HTML in syntax.
Some of the features of ColdFusion are as follows:
· Client and server cache management
· Client-side code generation, especially for form widgets and validation
· Conversion from HTML to PDF and FlashPaper
· Simplified database access
· GUI administration
· Server, application, client, session, and request scopes
· XML parsing, querying (XPath) validation and transformation (XSLT)
· Data retrieval from common enterprise systems
· Task scheduling
ColdFusion Versions
ColdFusion first version was released on 10th July 1995 which was completely developed by JJ Allaire. It has the following versions:
· Cold Fusion 3.1
· ColdFusion 4
· ColdFusion 4.5
· ColdFusion 5
· ColdFusion 6 aka MX
· ColdFusion MX 7
· Adobe ColdFusion 8
· Adobe ColdFusion 9
· Adobe ColdFusion Builder
One of the interesting things about ColdFusion is that it allows the developer to develop the application with less code. With ColdFusion 9, developers can condense complex business logic into even fewer lines of code.
Creating an application with ColdFusion is as straightforward as creating a static web site or web page. However, in ColdFusion application you can introduce an incredible range of functionality that is not available either in static web sites or in traditional client/server applications. A ColdFusion application is a collection of pages, similar to a static web site. But unlike the pages in a static Web site, the pages in a ColdFusion application consist of server-side ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) in addition to HTML. CFML gives the ability to control the behavior of the applications, integrate a wide range of server technologies, and dynamically generate the content that is returned to the web browser.
