Introducing ColdFusion

ColdFusion is an application server which provides better capabilities and better experience with most of the work done with basic html-like tags. It is available for all the popular platforms.

ColdFusion supports 3 types of database connections .

1) ODBC – one of the most popular and most widely used connection and is available for all databases.

2) OLE – DB – A connection type that is supported by Microsoft for connecting into databases such as MS-Access and sql server. This is available only in windows version of ColdFusion and needs a special set of drivers to access it in ColdFusion.

3) Native driver – The enterprise version of ColdFusion comes with this type of connection included, with a support to a few of databases. This driver provides much more feature access than ODBC.

ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) can be used in conjuction with HTML and other client side languages to generate a template to display.

The flow of a ColdFusion server processing requests :

1) The web browser requests data from the web server using files with .cfm extension.

2) The web server in turn sends the request to the ColdFusion application server.

3) All the data retrieval is done ColdFusion combines the output with the html in the page template and then the data is sent back to the web server which is in turn sent to the web browser for presentation.

Reference: Programming ColdFusion