Developing ColdFusion Applications
Introduction to ColdFusion

ColdFusion Features and Components

ColdFusion provides a comprehensive set of features and components for developing and managing your Web applications. Using the ColdFusion components, you can enhance the speed and ease of development, dynamically deploy your applications, integrate new and legacy technologies, and build secure applications.

About the features

The following table describes the ColdfFusion features that let you manage your Web site:

Benefits	Features
Rapid development	A tag-based server scripting language that is powerful and intuitive Two-way visual programming and database tools Remote interactive debugging for quickly identifying and fixing problems Web application wizards to automate common development tasks Source control integration to enable team development Secure file and database access using HTTP for remote development A tag-based component architecture for flexible code reuse
Scalable deployment	A multithreaded service architecture that scales across processors Database connection pooling to optimize database performance Just-in-time page compilation and caching to accelerate page request processing Dynamic load balancing for scalable performance in a cluster environment (Enterprise Edition only) Automatic server recovery and failover for high availability (Enterprise Edition only)
Open integration	Database connectivity using native database drivers (Enterprise Edition only), ODBC, or OLE DB Embedded support for full-text indexing and searching Standards-based integration with directory, mail, HTTP, FTP, and file servers Connectivity to distributed object technologies, including CORBA (Enterprise Edition only), COM (Windows Enterprise Edition only), Java objects and EJBs Open extensibility with C/C++ and Java
Security	Integration with existing authentication systems, including Windows NT domain and LDAP directory servers, and proprietary user and group databases Advanced access control so that server administrators can control developers' access to files and data sources Support for existing database security Server sandbox security for protecting multiple applications on a single server (Enterprise Edition only) Support for existing Web server authentication, security, and encryption

For detailed information about security, see Advanced ColdFusion Administration.

For the latest publications from Macromedia on security, visit the Security Zone at http://www.coldfusion.com/developer/securityzone/.

For a complete feature list and more detailed information, see the ColdFusion product pages at http://www.coldfusion.com/coldfusion.

About the components

ColdFusion applications rely on several core components:

• ColdFusion application pages
• ColdFusion Server
• ColdFusion Administrator
• ODBC data sources and other data sources

In addition to the core components, as you become more familiar with ColdFusion and build more complex applications, you can use ColdFusion Extensions to extend its capabilities.

ColdFusion application pages

ColdFusion application pages (often called templates) look somewhat like HTML pages, but are much more dynamic and powerful. They are the functional parts of a ColdFusion application, including the user interface pages and forms that handle data input and format data output. They can contain ColdFusion (CFML) tags, HTML tags, CFScript, JavaScript, and anything else that you can normally embed in an ordinary HTML page. You can easily access data sources, such as relational databases, from your application pages. The default file extension used for ColdFusion application pages is cfm.

CFML

CFML is a tag-based server scripting language that encapsulates complex processes, such as connecting to databases and LDAP servers, and sending e-mail. The core of the ColdFusion development platform language is more than 70 server-side tags and more than 200 functions.

ColdFusion Server

ColdFusion Server listens for requests from the Web server to process ColdFusion application pages. It runs as a service under Windows NT and as a process under UNIX.

For information on installing and configuring ColdFusion Server, see Installing and Configuring ColdFusion Server.

ColdFusion Administrator

You use the Administrator to configure various ColdFusion Server options, including:

• ColdFusion data sources
• Debugging output
• Server settings
• Application security
• Server clustering
• Scheduling page execution
• Directory mapping

For details on using the Administrator, see Advanced ColdFusion Administration.

Data sources

ColdFusion applications can interact with any database that supports the ODBC standard. However, ColdFusion is not limited to ODBC data sources. You can also retrieve data using OLE-DB, native database drivers, or directory servers that support the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). You can also retrieve data from mail servers that support the Post Office Protocol (POP), and index the data in Verity collections.

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