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CFML

Language type:

C - Command or Scripting

Description:

Cold Fusion Markup Language is a web scripting language designed to support dynamic page creation and database access in a web server environment. It is part of the commercial product Cold Fusion Web Application Server.
The syntax of CFML is exceptional among executable scripting languages: it consists mostly of HTML-style tags for all statements and control structures.
CFML is a weakly-typed language that supports only a few primitive types: integers, real numbers, strings, and dates. Several aggregate types are supported: arrays, lists, and associative arrays (also called structures).
Control structures supported in CFML include conditionals, several kinds of loops, and simple exception handling. Like many scripting languages, CFML supports dynamic interpretation of string data as code. CFML does not offer the ability to define subroutines, but it does support defining custom tags which can serve in a similar capacity.
Documentation about CFML is easy to obtain on the WWW.
The only implementation of CFML is in commercial products from Allaire.

Origin:

J.J. Allaire, 1995.

See Also:

PHP    VBScript    MAWL   

Remarks:

In addition to execution state, the CFML environment offers persistent state through its 'application' abstraction.
The HTML-style tag syntax of CFML is sometimes inconveniently verbose. To alleviate this, the designers of CFML 4.0 added a mini-language named CFScript that offers assignment, simple controls structures, and CFML expression syntax within a single enclosing pair of tags. CFScript is roughly comparable to some other server-side scripting languages like ASP and server-side Javascript.
The current version of CFML, as of the late 1999, is 4.01. In addition to the basic language, it comes with wide support for database systems and SQL, common application protocols, regular expressions, and host system facilities.

Links:

Cold Fusion docs download

Cold Fusion Adviser

House of Fusion

Date:

Last updated 11/20/99

Sample code:

A simple example of defining the body of a custom tag (from the CFML 4.0 documentation).

<CFSWITCH EXPRESSION="#ThisTag.ExecutionMode#">
    <CFCASE VALUE="start">
       <CFIF StructIsEmpty(attributes.EMPINFO)>
       <CFOUTPUT>Error. No employee data was passed.</CFOUTPUT>
             <CFEXIT METHOD="ExitTag">
       <CFELSE>
       <!--- Add the employee --->
       <CFQUERY NAME="AddEmployee" DATASOURCE="cfsnippets">
           INSERT INTO Employees
           (FirstName, LastName, Email, Phone, Department)
           VALUES
       <CFOUTPUT>
        (
         ‘#StructFind(attributes.EMPINFO, "firstname")#’ ,
         ‘#StructFind(attributes.EMPINFO, "lastname")#’ ,
         ‘#StructFind(attributes.EMPINFO, "email")#’ ,
         ‘#StructFind(attributes.EMPINFO, "phone")#’ ,
         ‘#StructFind(attributes.EMPINFO, "department")#’
         )
       </CFOUTPUT>
       </CFQUERY>
       </CFIF>
    <CFOUTPUT><HR>Employee Add Complete</CFOUTPUT>
    </CFCASE>
</CFSWITCH>

Descriptions in this dictionary are ©1997-99 Neal Ziring. Some examples copyright of their respective authors. Some technologies and languages are trademarked. Permission to copy descriptions is granted as long as authorship credit is preserved.

Comments on this dictionary, corrections and suggestions, are all welcome. Please use email, the address is ziring@home.com