Publishing Dynamic Data

A Web application page is different from a static Web page because it can publish data dynamically. This can involve querying databases, connecting to LDAP or mail servers, and leveraging COM, DCOM, CORBA, or Java objects to retrieve, update, insert, and delete data at runtime-as your users interact with pages in their browsers.

For ColdFusion developers, the term data source can refer to a number of different types of structured content accessible locally or across a network. You can query Web sites, LDAP servers, POP mail servers, and documents in a variety of formats.

Most commonly though, a database drives your applications, and for this discussion a data source means the entry point from ColdFusion to a database.

In this chapter, you build a query to retrieve data from the CompanyInfo data source, which accesses a Microosft Access database (company.mdb), on Windows systems or a DBase database on UNIX systems. In subsequent chapters in this book, you will insert and update data in this database.

To query a database, you need to use:

ColdFusion data sources
The cfquery tag
SQL commands

Developing ColdFusion Applications
Querying a Database