Download - Week 2
Week 2
IBS 685
Static Page Architecture
• The user requests the page by typing a URL in a browser
• The Browser requests the page from the Web Server
• The Web Server sends the page to the browser in the form of HTML
• The browser interprets the HTML and displays the page to the user.
Web Servers
• Web Servers send requested pages to browsers – Reply to requests from browsers using HTTP
– Perform server side processing using these languages • CFML
• ASP (Microsofts Active Server pages)
• Perl
• Java
Understanding Web Applications
• Web Servers Just serve• Web servers are simple applications- they sit and
wait for requests that they attempt to fulfill as soon as they arrive.
• Web servers do not – let you interact with a database;– they don’t let you personalize web pages;– they don’t let you process the results of a users form
submission
• All they do is serve pages.
So how do you extend your server to do all the things just
listed?
Web Application Servers
• That is where Web Application servers come into play.
• A web application server is a piece of software that extends the Web Server, enabling it to do things it could not do by itself.
Application server
• When a web server receives a request from a Web Browser, it looks at that request to determine whether it is a simple web page or a page that needs processing by a web application server.
• Cfm extension• If so then the web server passes it to the
appropriate Web application server and returns the results that it gets back
What is Cold Fusion
• It is a complete application development system• The components include
– CF application server
– Dreamweaver
• CF usually resides on the same computer as your web server, enabling a web server to do things it would not normally know how to do.
CFML
• Cold Fusion is two distinct technologies– The CF Application server– The CFML language
• Cold Fusion’s power comes from its capable and flexible language. • CFML extends HTML by adding tags with the following
capabilities– Read and update data to, databases and tables– Create dynamic data-driven pages– Perform conditional processing– Populate forms with live data– Process form submissions– Generate and retrieve email messages– Interact with local files
CFML
• <Cfinclude>• <Cfoutput>• <Cfabort>• <Cfapplication>• <Cfcookie>• <Cfform>• <Cflocation>
• All ColdFusion tags begin with the letters CF
• CF tags were named very intelligently
• CFML tags can be freely mixed with the HTML tags in the page
• Each tag identifies a particular operation– Including block of code– Setting a variable
Book Files
• On the CD Rom that accompanies this book, in the OWS directory, you will find the sample application pages used in the chapters.
• You should store all the sample applications in a folder named OWS under the Web server root directory.
• Web Server root is located at – C:\CfusionMX7\wwwroot
Cold Fusion Administrator
• CF Application server has all sorts configuration and management options. – Some must be configured before features will work
(Connections to databases)
– Other options are configured if necessary.
• All these configuration options are managed via CFA. – You can access it from any computer with an internet
connection.
Always LOG OUT
• You should get in the habit of always logging out of the administrator when you are finished using it.
Using the CFA
• Creating an ODBC data source• For CF to interact with a database, a
connection to that database must be defined.• ODBC is is not a CF invention many
programs other than CF use ODBC. • Data sources are the ODBC connections.• Lets create a data source for the OWS
database.
Basic Development Configuration
Development Database
Development Server
ColdFusionDevelopers
Run a web server and Cold Fusion ServerHosts Web sites and CF Templates
Database on a separate machineMS SQL Server, Oracle
Dynamic Page Publishing with Cold Fusion
• The information is usually queried from a database and then displayed on the page
• Dynamic page processing is similar to that of static page processing with additional steps: