The use of the ColdFusion suite is quite common in the Windows hosting environment but it is also supported in the Linux/Unix arena. It's extremely popular with Web designers and Webmasters because the scripting language is relatively easy to learn for those with basic HTML skills. Like HTML it's tag based and applications can written fairly quickly in comparison to other languages such as ASP, PHP and CGI which requires much more use of code. The mark up language is simply called ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) and contains all the formatting and processing functions a user requires. CFML files have the file extension .cfm.

This method of creating Web applications has significant advantages over conventional application development. Advantages include :

• * coldfusion applications can be developed rapidly because no coding, other than use of simple html style tags, is required.
• * coldfusion applications are easy to test and roll out.
• * the coldfusion language contains all the processing and formatting functions you'll need (and the capability to create your own functions if you really run into a dead end).
• * coldfusion applications are easy to maintain because no compilation or linking step is required (files actually are compiled, but that happens transparently as i'll explain shortly). the files you create are the files used by coldfusion.
• * coldfusion provides all the tools you need to troubleshoot and debug applications, including a powerful development environment and debugger.
• * coldfusion comes with all the hooks necessary to link to almost any database application and any other external system.
• * coldfusion is fast, thanks to its scalable, multithreaded, service-based architecture.
• * coldfusion is built on industry standard java architecture, and supports all major standards and initiatives.