# Welcome and Introduction

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This week's activities include starting to learn a scripting languages called CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language or ColdFusion or CF for short). It is a language which was created here in Boston in 1995 (which makes it a year younger than PHP!) by a company named Allaire. It is now on its 14th version (soon to be 15 with the upcoming 2023 release) and is championed by both a very active community of users and Adobe, who acquired it when they purchased Macromedia several years ago. There is also a popular Open Source CFML server named Lucee which is available and a viable (and free) alternative to using Adobe ColdFusion. The two engines both parse CFML but also are starting to have a few idiosyncrasies and features of their own.

CF is a powerful language with which is is remarkably easy to get started. The main reason for this is its syntax (or format). Actually CFML has two syntaxes. It can be written in a TAG format which looks very similar to HTML with tags, properties and values. It also has a script syntax which looks more similar to JavaScript. We are going to use the tag syntax for times when we are going to display ColdFusion data on the screen and the script syntax when we write code that works “behind the scenes” so to speak.

Conceptually, most programming languages do the same things, even if the way they approach these functions might look and act differently from each other. Almost everything we go through with ColdFusion in this course will be applicable in other programming classes you might take in the future.

This week's assignment is to go through the pages in this tutorial and get the beginning of a working knowledge of CFML. Each page will have an exercise to go through in addition to some background information. Message me if you have any questions or join in this week's chat.

Have Fun!!