ColdFusion Markup Language, more commonly known as CFML, is a scripting language for web development that runs on the Java virtual machine (JVM), the .NET framework, and Google App Engine. Several commercial and free and open-source software implementations of CFML engines are available, including Adobe ColdFusion, Lucee, New Atlanta BlueDragon (Java and .NET versions), Railo, Open BlueDragon, and other CFML server engines.
Synopsis
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. CFML also includes many other constructs including ColdFusion Components (CFCs), CFML's version of objects, that allow separating business logic from presentation.
CFML can be written using either tags or CFScript, which resembles JavaScript (ECMAScript).
The pages in a CFML application include the server-side CFML tags and functions in addition to HTML tags. 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.
CFML can also be used to generate other languages, aside from HTML, such as XML, JavaScript, CSS, and so on.
Despite the name, CFML is not a markup language. It is also not SGML, since certain core CFML features prevent it from complying.
The CFML engine is configured in such a way that certain file extensions on the server (.cfm, .cfc) are handed off to the CFML engine for processing. In the case of the Java-based engines this is accomplished via Java servlets. The CFML engine only processes CFML tags and functions; it returns text outside of CFML tags and functions to the web server unchanged.
History
Named Cold Fusion at the outset, the software was created in 1995 by the Allaire Corporation, originally located in Minnesota. It later moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and then finally to Newton, Massachusetts before being acquired by Macromedia in 2001. Allaire Cold Fusion thus became Macromedia Cold Fusion. At the release of version 4, the space in the name was removed to become ColdFusion. Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. , it is still actively developing ColdFusion.
In 1998 Alan Williamson and his Scottish company, "n-ary", began creating a templating engine for Java to simplify common programming tasks. Williamson was using curly-brace notation instead of tags, but when he saw an example of CFML and how it was solving similar problems (although not in Java) using a tag syntax, he started developing what would eventually become BlueDragon, which was the first Java implementation of the CFML language. (ColdFusion was written in C and C++ until version 6.0, the first Java-based version, was released in 2002.) New Atlanta licensed BlueDragon around 2001 and made it available as a commercial product, eventually creating a .NET implementation of CFML. Open BlueDragon is a fork of the commercial BlueDragon product and was first released in 2008.
The Railo CFML engine began as a student project in 2002 and was first launched as a commercial project in 2005. Railo announced they were making the engine open source in 2008, and the first open source version was released in 2009.
On June 18, 2009, Adobe announced at the CFUnited conference that it had formed a CFML Advisory Committee that would be responsible for guiding and reviewing changes to the CFML language. This effort was disbanded in 2010. The Google Group CFML Conventional Wisdom was created as a forum for open, public discussions about language and engine features; its use has dwindled since 2011.
In 2012, the OpenCFML Foundation was launched. Its function is to push open-source CFML applications and platforms.
Former Railo lead developer Michael Offner launched Lucee, a fork of Railo, in London on January 29, 2015. Backed by community supporters and members of the Lucee Association, the goal of the project is to provide the functionality of CFML using fewer resources, giving better performance and to move CFML past its roots and into a modern and dynamic Web programming platform.
