ColdFusion is one of the hottest options available for creating dynamic, data-driven websites.

As you motor on and continue to work to improve your website, you’ll get involved in working with a database, or several , for that matter. Simply stated, a database is a collection of files and using a database effectively will greatly improve how you maneuver your website particularly in adding, removing and updating content on your website.

When choosing your Web hosting provider, you are usually faced with various choices of databases to work with. In the Windows environment the popular choice is often MS SQL and in the Linux platform it is likely MySQL. Or the choice could even be Oracle depending on the provider. If your site is of the smaller variety with static pages, which consist of text, images and HTML formatting, and this suits your purpose chances are that a database option was not too much of a concern. If however, displaying a large amount of information on your website is necessary a database option is the way to go. You’ll discover that database driven sites can be built using any of several scripting languages of which the most familiar include: PHP, JSP, Perl, ASP.NET and the interestingly-named ColdFusion.

ColdFusion was developed by Macromedia, the firm that was acquired by Adobe in the spring of 2005. This is one of the finer options to enable you to create dynamic, data-driven websites. Dynamic web pages are those that are returned once the user has placed a search or query. So if you enter a zip code on a website to pull up the locations of cinemas in your city, the resulting Web page that is displayed is a dynamic page. Similarly if you needed to access an employee listing from a site, by requesting a name or job title, this can be accomplished by drawing the information from a database-driven site.

ColdFusion is best understood as a suite made up of server and a set of development tools, which simplifies the process to create these information laden, data-driven dynamic Web pages, to help users extract important information easily or valuable customized data from simple queries.

The use of the ColdFusion suite is quite common in the Windows hosting environment but it is also supported in the Linux/Unix arena. It’s extremely popular with Web designers and Webmasters because the scripting language is relatively easy to learn for those with basic HTML skills. Like HTML it’s tag based and applications can written fairly quickly in comparison to other languages such as AASP, PHP and CGI which requires much more use of code. The mark up language is simply called ColdFusion markup Language (CFML) and contains all the formatting and processing functions a user requires. CFML files have the file extension .cfm.

So if you’re all excited about the new possibilities of getting started with creating dynamic pages and taking the first step in creating even eCommerce applications for your online stores get with the CF program now. A demo is available at
http://www.macromedia.com/software/coldfusion/demos/ or talk to your Web hosting provider for further details.