ColdFusion Introduction

ColdFusion is a powerful server-side scripting language that allows users to interact with databases to produce dynamic pages. ColdFusion is a tag-based language and very easy to learn to use but also a powerful programming environment. At the end of this class, you will be able to create pages that display a requested set of records from the database. You will be able to create forms that allow users to add, edit or delete records from the database. You will be able to create data-driven applications using application, client and session variables. A good understanding of web page creation is useful but not necessary for this class. You will need access to ColdFusion Server. A free evaluation version is available.

To get started:

• Click on the Syllabus link below to find information about the course and the book
• Click on Introductions link to meet your instructor and introduce yourself
• Post any questions you have in Questions and Comments

Lesson 1: Getting Started

Compared with the Internet of today, the Internet of 15 years ago was a very boring place indeed. Besides lacking colors, fonts, animation and interactivity, the Internet lacked a way to create dynamic content.

Since that time many tools have been created to make the presentation more lively and in addition tools have been developed to allow users to connect to databases and provide dynamic data to their users. If you have been working with web development, you have probably heard of ASP, JSP, PHP and ColdFusion.

So why develop with ColdFusion? When it comes down to it, most of the tools for building data-driven web sites will do basically the same thing. The advantage that ColdFusion offers is a simple tag-based language that web developers who are not programmers and who do not want to be programmers can easily learn. Many of the tasks that can be accomplished in ColdFusion with one or two tags take many, many lines of code in most of the other applications.

During this lesson you will be introduced to the concept of ColdFusion and get to see the very basics of building a web page using ColdFusion. You will be given the opportunity to install ColdFusion on your computer for use in developing your web pages. The trial version will run indefinitely as long as you are accessing it from the machine on which it was installed. You will not be able to access it from another machine across the network. This will give you a chance to see the administration of ColdFusion. Many aspects of ColdFusion will make much more sense when seen from the Administrator's point of view as well as from the developer's point of view.

Strap yourself in - Here we go!