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ColdFusion Markup Language, more commonly known as CFML, is a scripting language for web development that runs on the JVM, the .NET framework, and Google App Engine. Multiple commercial and open source implementations of CFML engines are available, including Adobe ColdFusion, Lucee, New Atlanta BlueDragon (who makes both a Java-based and a .NET-based version), Railo, and Open BlueDragon as well as other CFML server engines.
In its simplest form, like many other web scripting languages CFML augments standard HTML files with database commands, conditional operators, high-level formatting functions, and other elements to produce web applications.[1][2] CFML also includes numerous other constructs including ColdFusion Components (CFCs), CFML's version of objects, that allow for separation of business logic from presentation.
CFML can be written using either tags or CFScript, which is an ECMA script style language.
The pages in a CFML application include the server-side CFML tags and functions in addition to HTML tags, and modern CFML applications also tend to have CFCs that are accessed by the CFML pages for executing business logic. When a web browser requests a page in a ColdFusion application, it is automatically pre-processed by the ColdFusion application server.
Syntax
CFML tags have a similar format to HTML tags. They are enclosed in angle brackets (< and >) and generally have zero or more named attributes, though some tags (e.g. cfset, cfif) contain an expression rather than attributes. Many CFML tags have bodies; that is, they have beginning and end tags with text to be processed between them.
Other tags, such as cfset and cfftp, never have bodies; all the required information goes between the beginning (<) character and the ending (>) character in the form of tag attributes (name/value pairs), as in the example below. If it is legal for tags not to have a body, it is syntactically acceptable to leave them unclosed as in the first example, though many CFML developers choose to self-close tags
In its simplest form, like many other web scripting languages CFML augments standard HTML files with database commands, conditional operators, high-level formatting functions, and other elements to produce web applications.[1][2] CFML also includes numerous other constructs including ColdFusion Components (CFCs), CFML's version of objects, that allow for separation of business logic from presentation.
CFML can be written using either tags or CFScript, which is an ECMA script style language.
The pages in a CFML application include the server-side CFML tags and functions in addition to HTML tags, and modern CFML applications also tend to have CFCs that are accessed by the CFML pages for executing business logic. When a web browser requests a page in a ColdFusion application, it is automatically pre-processed by the ColdFusion application server.
Syntax
CFML tags have a similar format to HTML tags. They are enclosed in angle brackets (< and >) and generally have zero or more named attributes, though some tags (e.g. cfset, cfif) contain an expression rather than attributes. Many CFML tags have bodies; that is, they have beginning and end tags with text to be processed between them.
Other tags, such as cfset and cfftp, never have bodies; all the required information goes between the beginning (<) character and the ending (>) character in the form of tag attributes (name/value pairs), as in the example below. If it is legal for tags not to have a body, it is syntactically acceptable to leave them unclosed as in the first example, though many CFML developers choose to self-close tags