Additional Features of ColdFusion

• Simplified database access
• Client and server cache management
• Client-side code generation, especially for form widgets and validation
• Conversion from HTML to PDF and FlashPaper
• Data retrieval from common enterprise systems such as Active Directory, LDAP, SMTP, POP, HTTP, FTP, Microsoft Exchange Server and common data formats such as RSS and Atom
• File indexing and searching service based on Verity K2
• GUI administration
• Server, application, client, session, and request scopes
• XML parsing, querying (XPath), validation and transformation(XSLT)
• Server clustering
• Task scheduling
• Graphing and reporting
  
• Simplified file manipulation including raster graphics(and CAPTCHA) and zip archives (introduction of video manipulation is planned in a future release)
• Simplified web service implementation (with automated WSDL generation / transparent SOAP handling for both creating and consuming services

ColdFusion

ColdFusion MX 7 code is compiled into Java bytecode, making it extremely portable, flexible and powerful. ColdFusion is made up of two parts:

1. ColdFusion Application Server
2. ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML)

ColdFusion Application Server
When a user navigates in a browser to a page that ends with a .cfm extension, the request is sent to a Web server, which directs the request to the ColdFusion Application Server (CFAS).

ColdFusion Markup Language
The ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) looks very similar to HTML or XML in that it is tag-based. A ColdFusion page generally has a mix of HTML and ColdFusion tags, and may contain other tags as well. ColdFusion tags can be distinguished from all other tags by their first two letters - cf (e.g, ).