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 messages –Interact with local files

CFML 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 ColdFusion Developers Run a web server and Cold Fusion Server Hosts Web sites and CF Templates Database on a separate machine MS 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: