In this regard, ColdFusion is a similar product to Microsoft ASP.NET, JavaServer Pages or PHP.
ColdFusion MX was also designed to integrate well with Macromedia Flash using Flash Remoting.
More than 14,000 developers worldwide were active in the beta process - many more testers than the 5,000 Adobe Systems originally expected. The ColdFusion development team consisted of developers based in Newton/Boston, Massachusetts and Bangalore, India.
CFML authors simply place HTML and CSS within a pair of cfdocument tags and specify the desired format (FlashPaper or PDF). The generated document can then either be saved to disk or sent to the client's browser.ColdFusion 8 has now introduced the cfpdf tag which allows for unprecedented control over PDF documents including PDF forms, and merging of PDFs.
ColdFusion falls into the category of OO languages that do not support multiple inheritance (along with Java, Smalltalk etc.) nictunney.com - Coldfusion MoFo . With the MX release (6+), ColdFusion introduced the component language construct which resembles classes in OO languages. Each component may contain any number of properties and methods. One component may also extend another (Inheritance). Components only support single inheritance. With the release of ColdFusion 8, Java-style interfaces are supported. ColdFusion components use the file extension cfc to differentiate them from ColdFusion templates (.cfm).
ColdFusion 8 introduced the ability to serialize ColdFusion data structures to JSON for consumption on the client.
Access to a component's documentation requires a password. A developer can view the documentation for all components known to the ColdFusion server by navigating to the ColdFusion URL. This interface resembles the Javadoc HTML documentation for Java classes.
A standard CFML page can be interpreted as a tag, with the tag name corresponding to the file name prefixed with "cf_". For example, the file IMAP.cfm can be used as the tag "cf_imap". Attributes used within the tag are available in the ATTRIBUTES scope of the tag implementation page. CFML pages are accessible in the same directory as the calling page, via a special directory in the ColdFusion web application, or via a CFIMPORT tag in the calling page. The latter method does not necessarily require the "cf_" prefix for the tag name.
CFX tags are prefixed with "cfx_", for example "cfx_imap". Tags are added to the ColdFusion runtime environment using the ColdFusion administrator, where JAR or DLL files are registered as custom tags.
ColdFusion can not only bring together disparate technologies within the enterprise, but can make those technologies available to a number of clients beyond the web browser including, but not limited to, the Flash Player, Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), Mobile devices (SMS), Acrobat Reader (PDF) and IM gateways.
When ColdFusion templates are saved to disk, they are traditionally given the extension .cfm or .cfml. The .cfc extension is used for ColdFusion Components. The original extension was DBM or DBML, which stood for Database Markup Language. When talking about ColdFusion, most users use the acronym CF and this is used for numerous ColdFusion resources such as user groups (CFUGs) and sites.
Even Microsoft-based solutions such as ASP.NET are technically free if you own a PC or server running some version of Windows. For developers who do not wish to host their own site (and personally purchase ColdFusion Server), shared hosting accounts are readily available at comparable prices to PHP or ASP.NET hosting.
Although the language of CFML itself is documented, Adobe ColdFusion's server code is not viewable or modifiable.
ColdFusion does include some server-side Actionscript functionality, however ColdFusion's server-side Actionscript has significantly fewer features than CFML.
Source: Wikipedia > Coldfusion
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