Adobe ColdFusion is an application server and software development framework used for the development of computer software in general, and dynamic web sites in particular. In this regard, ColdFusion is a similar product to Microsoft ASP.NET, JavaServer Pages or PHP. ColdFusion was the first amongst these technologies to provide the developer the capability of creating dynamic websites that were attached to a backend database.
The primary distinguishing feature of Adobe ColdFusion is its associated scripting language, ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), which compares to JSP, ASP.NET, or PHP and resembles HTML in syntax. "ColdFusion" is often used synonymously with "CFML", but it should be noted that there are additional CFML application servers besides ColdFusion, and that ColdFusion supports programming languages other than CFML, such as server-side Actionscript and embedded scripts that can be written in a JavaScript-like language, known as CFScript (CFScript is an extension of CFML on the ColdFusion platform. CFScript resembles JavaScript. Some ColdFusion developers prefer it since it has less visual and typographical overhead than ordinary CFML; only the actual changes are represented in the code (whereas normal CFML would involve CFSET tags at every line).
Originally a product of Allaire, and released in July 1995, ColdFusion was originally developed by brothers JJ and Jeremy Allaire. In 2001 Allaire was acquired by Macromedia, which was in turn acquired by Adobe Systems in 2005.
ColdFusion is most often used for data-driven web sites or intranets, but can also be used to generate remote services such as SOAP web services or Flash remoting. It is especially well-suited as the server-side technology to the client-side Flex.
ColdFusion can also handle asynchronous events such as SMS and instant messaging via its gateway interface, available in ColdFusion MX 7 Enterprise Edition. |
