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Hopefully, at this point, light bulbs are popping over your head and bells are ringing in your ears with reasons to use this great tool on your own projects. Just in case there aren't, in the next few sections I'll cover a few reasons why ColdFusion is a tool that we utilize for our repertoire of development applications.


ColdFusion gives you the ability to control some of or all of your entire Web site's content from a database. The beauty of this may not strike you just yet, but consider a situation where you might be working with others who aren't as HTML-savvy as yourself. Without ColdFusion, a change in content means that someone has to come in and code a new HTML page, and that someone will probably be you, regardless of the importance of whatever you were doing when your pager went off. With ColdFusion, Web content can be changed or updated by anyone who knows his way around an input form and an enter key. This means that anyone in the company -- even those without database experience -- can update their Web projects without you having to drive down to the office and possibly miss the bonus round on "The Price Is Right."

In addition, database-driven sites give you the ability to present lots and lots of material on the Web, and you only need to design a single template file. Take my Liz database, for example. It's pretty small now, but someday if that database should stretch into hundreds or thousands of husbands, my initial template page would easily handle all of them. I'd have one killer website that looked as if I'd spent hours designing pages.

Database-driven sites also present interesting opportunities to keep tabs on your visitors. If your site required users to register with a login name and password, for example, you could then use the database behind the scenes to track their interests by logging the pages they visit.


Many businesses love databases, and these businesses may come to love ColdFusion. It's not hard to see why. Many businesses maintain a database of their products or services, and for an existing database, ColdFusion makes it a short hop to a full-featured website. Show me a business with a large product catalog and I'll show you, the Web developer, a quick way to deliver a full-featured website that will have your client dancing in the streets.


Many businesses can use ColdFusion directly with their active databases. This means that the moment someone in the warehouse records a product as shipped, the pages on the website immediately reflect the change in inventory. In most cases, businesses can continue to use the same database, spreadsheet, or word processing software they've always used in the same way they've always used it. Just imagine the reception when you march into a business and tell its owners that you can put their entire operation online in real-time -- without their forking over a cent to retrain employees.


Due to the nature of their product or service, some businesses don't really require an extensive Web presence, but this doesn't mean that you, the ColdFusion developer, need to pass them by. Lots of businesses use ColdFusion as an intranet tool.

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New Term -- An intranet is an internal network that is usually not available to Web users. Intranets are used within businesses for employee tasks such as information sharing, maintaining the company database, or vital communications such as "Hey, Jim in accounting, how was the big bash last night?"

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Many businesses have found that using Web-like interfaces to control their intranets helps new employees assimilate quickly and easily. Many have at least experimented with a Web browser, so by presenting intranet data in the form of Web pages, businesses can avoid having to acquaint new hires with several applications.

ColdFusion is ideal for building these Web-based interfaces, and its database functions are just as valuable on intranets as they are on the Web outside.

Site security is generally a pretty big concern for businesses, whether it's keeping the advertising staff from rewriting editorial copy or keeping outsiders from rifling through the company secrets. ColdFusion has several security measures built in to the program, meaning that even inexperienced CF designers don't need to worry much about leaving their sites open to hackers.

ColdFusion is e-commerce ready, with lots of built-in tools and tricks that make it easy to build sites offering secure online transactions. We have a tool here that allows you to quickly serve up a huge database of products or services, plus the ability to easily make them available for sale online. Bells ringing yet?