Book Image

ColdFusion 9 Developer Tutorial

By : John Farrar
Book Image

ColdFusion 9 Developer Tutorial

By: John Farrar

Overview of this book

Adobe ColdFusion is an application server, renowned for rapid development of dynamic websites, with a straightforward language (CFML), powerful methods for packaging and reusing your code, and AJAX support that will get developers deep into powerful web applications quickly. However, developing rich and robust web applications can be a real challenge as it involves multiple processes.With this practical guide, you will learn how to build professional ColdFusion applications. Packed with example code, and written in a friendly, easy-to-read style, this book is just what you need if you are serious about ColdFusion.This book will give you clear, concise, and practical guidance to take you from the basics of ColdFusion 9 to the skills that will make you a ColdFusion developer to be reckoned with. It also covers the new features of ColdFusion 9 like ORM Database Interaction and CF Builder.ColdFusion expert John Farrar will teach you the basics of ColdFusion programming, application architecture, and object reuse, before showing you a range of topics including AJAX library integration, RESTful Web Services, PDF creation and manipulation, and dynamically generated presentation files that will make you the toast of your ColdFusion developer town.This book digs deep with the basics, with real-world examples of the how and whys, to get more done faster with ColdFusion 9.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
ColdFusion 9 Developer Tutorial
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Custom tags


We will discuss the advantages and the various uses of custom tags. We chose skinning because it's the best example of the power and techniques of custom tag creation and its benefits:

  • Custom tags can wrap a block of code and conditionally execute that code

  • Custom tags can process logic based on both start and end tags

  • Custom tags can have parent-child functionality

  • Custom tags can read and set calling code variables

  • Custom tags can return multiple variables

Our first custom tag

We are going to start with a simple page and look at changing it into a combined page that calls custom tags. We should also note that some of the fancy non-generic layout is being delivered via a CSS file included through HTML. First, let us look at the original code of our page:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"...