The Web is now the best way to deploy your applications. It is because of the ease of use and reach to your users and, of course, the fact that you only have to deploy one version of your code for everyone to use.
To get this done, you would have probably looked at different languages and even frameworks out there. Did they seem complicated to get going? Were there lots of new terms to learn?
This is where Railo Server comes in. It provides an easy way to write and deploy your applications using a language that is very similar to HTML (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML), about which you'd already know if you happened to work with static websites.
If you are already using HTML, Railo Server is a perfect addition to your toolkit!
In this book, you will learn how to use Railo Server to develop web applications in a very efficient manner. We will also introduce the different features and options available to get things done easily and quickly as we go along.
In this chapter, we will:
Introduce you to the Railo Server
Introduce you to some of the features of Railo Server
Show you why Railo Server and CFML make developing web applications a breeze
Let's dive right in!
HTML per-se (without JavaScript) is a static language, which means that you cannot query databases, send e-mails, execute searches, or generally interact with the server, and return dynamic results to the user.
Imagine that you need to do one of the above tasks. HTML doesn't offer any solutions for these kinds of problems because it is just a way to display information and not manipulate other systems.
What can we do in order to overcome this problem?
ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) neatly fits into the HTML syntax and allows you to place CFML tags in-between HTML tags. Basically, Railo Server generates HTML, which is then interpreted by the browser.
Depending on the tags that you are using, different HTML pages are sent back to the client.
Let's have a look at an example Railo Server template:
<html>
<head><title>An Example Template</title></head>
<body>
<div id="AccountHeader">
<cfif SESSION.loggedIn>
<h3>Private bank account No.:
<cfoutput>#bank.accountNr#</cfoutput>
Show secret information
</cfif>
</div>
</body>
</html>
The highlighted code above shows you some CFML (or Railo Template) code. This code is dynamic and will run on the server before returning the rendered HTML back to the browser that requested the page.
If you are used to reading HTML code, you can easily figure out what the previous code is supposed to do. (It displays the HTML between the <cfif> tags if the variable loggedIn in the SESSION is true.)