Macromedia Studio 8: Training from the Source

Chapter 14. Connecting to Data Sources

In Lesson 13, Dynamic, Data-Driven Sites, you got your Macromedia ColdFusion site up and running. You also created a simple ColdFusion application that displayed a variable passed through a Web form from a different page. The real power of a server model such as ColdFusion is its ability to interact with data sources such as text files, XML documents, and—above all—databases. With those data sources, ColdFusion (or ASP, PHP, or JSP) can insert, edit, delete, and/or extract a particular set of data, and output that data as if it were standard HTML. This interactivity with a data source enables you to create password-protected pages, surveys, testing environments, message boards, dynamic press release applications, ...