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Macromedia's ColdFusion is a rapid application development platform. Through the use of a tag-based scripting language, it enables you to build and to deploy powerful web-based applications. Even if you do not have any type of programming experience, learning ColdFusion is a breeze with the help of Mike Muller. He guides you through this Virtual Training Company tutorial by taking you through the development of an actual community web site. He reviews connecting to databases with SQL, using includes and scoped variables. He also covers the user log-in process, creating "cork boards," searchable directories, "screen-scraping," and much more. Start learning now by clicking one of the topics below.
Welcome to Cold Fusion. What is Cold Fusion? Well, as it says in the help files, Cold Fusion is rapid application development system for professional developers who want to create dynamic web applications and interactive websites. That's very true, but you don't get the full scope of what they are saying in that language. Cold Fusion server leverages the power of HTML, standard HTML tags and concepts, extends it with Cold Fusion mark up language tags, functions and scripts (if you want to get advanced) to create a single point of development - in contrast to Perl, where you would include Perl programs with an include statement, include HTML tag. So, half your code is off somewhere else. With Cold Fusion all the code is in your CFM file. You can parse some of it out, externalize some of it within a CFM include tags, but generally the brunt of what you are trying to do on a page, checking someone's login or calling up a file from a database, a record from a database is all within the CFM page itself, the HTML page itself. And this is incredibly powerful: you are not moving around from other files to other files, and you can really create intricately dynamic pages, HTML pages, by sprinkling 'if' statements around certain rows of tables, and I mean it's really limitless of what you can do. Its very exciting for an HTML developer, just a regular web developer, who has done a little bit of Perl, which is a lot of people out there. Using Cold Fusion is very exciting. The learning curve is remarkable short, and you can really get going pretty quickly, if you had any kind of programming experience in the past. What are we going to do on this CD? Well on this CD you are going to watch development of an actual web site. There are, the later half of this CD is just examples of various tags and functions. We can't cover all of them on this CD, so we'll cover the more common ones and the simpler ones, because this is just an introduction to Cold Fusion. But you can create pretty intricate and well developed web applications even using the simplest of the Cold Fusion tags. So we will develop a web site on here, one that already exists MontagueMA.net, Montague Massachusetts. There is already website out there using PERL and various other things - HTML, using SSI (server side includes) to get pretty dynamic and it's a very successful website. But it's in Perl and in flat text files, and administration is difficult - it involves lot of FTP to upload and download text flat databases to modify, and it's just a bit of a hassle. But with Cold Fusion, everything can be administered right on the web using access database and all the coding right on the web pages themselves to create dynamic pages on the fly. People will be able to log in, modify their business listings, they will be able to go in and modify old corporate messages that they have left, perhaps even get email. and modify old corporate messages that they have left, perhaps even get email.