ColdFusion is a programming language based on standard HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) that is used to write dynamic webpages. It lets you create pages on the fly that differ depending on user input, database lookups, time of day or whatever other criteria you dream up!

Creating a ColdFusion application allows you to introduce an incredible range of functionality that is not available either in static Web sites or in traditional client/server applications. A ColdFusion application is very simply a collection of pages, similar to a static Web site. But unlike the pages in a static Web site, the pages in a ColdFusion application include the server-side ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) in addition to HTML. CFML gives you the ability to control the behavior of your applications, integrate a wide range of server technologies, and dynamically generate the content that is returned to the Web browser.

When a page in a ColdFusion application is requested by a browser, it is automatically pre-processed by the ColdFusion Application Server. Based on the CFML in the page, the Application Server executes the application logic, interacts with other server technologies, and then dynamically generates an HTML page which is returned to the browser.