ColdFusion Markup Language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ColdFusion Markup Language, more commonly known as CFML, is the scripting language used by Adobe ColdFusion and several alternative server environments. It is similar to HTML in appearance, in that it uses tags. As well as ColdFusion, CFML also powers several other engines, such as BlueDragon, Coral Web Builder, IgniteFusion, Railo, and others.
[edit] Syntax
Tags which are included in the core runtime are always prefixed with a cf.
Procedural style functions are available throughout a CFML script.
CFML is generally considered a dynamic language. However, various tags offer the ability to type-check input parameters (eg: cffunction, cfparam, cfqueryparam) if the programmer declares their type specifically. It is debated whether this is good practice, as failure occurs at runtime regardless of whether type checking is used or not.
CFML is case insensitive.
CFML relies heavily on maps, where the keys are always strings and the values are not type specific. Values are often access using dot notation, but -- depending on the CFML implementation -- can be accessed via procedural functions, or can be treated as objects where instance get methods are invoked.
CFML need not be well-formed. If it is legal for tags not to have a body, it is syntactically acceptable to leave them unclosed. For example:
<cfset value = "hello">
The self-closing variant
<cfset value = "hello"/>
is also legal. Which style should be used is an often debated issue.
[edit] See also
Hello
