Enter the Dragon: Develop ColdFusion Apps for Free

For web developers who are just starting out, the idea of learning ColdFusion can be daunting, especially given that hosting a commercial site on Adobe ColdFusion server has the potential to be quite costly. While Adobe does provide a free, fully functional developer version of its ColdFusion server, it only allows for a browser from the local machine, plus two IP addresses, to connect at a time. This can place restrictions on the development process. For example, if one was seeking help and wanted to share a work-in-progress with others, Adobe's development server would prevent this.

Introducing BlueDragon

Enter the dragon! The BlueDragon Server, that is. BlueDragon is a CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) web server (much like Adobe's ColdFusion Server), created by a company called New Atlanta. Like the Adobe server, the BlueDragon development server is free. But unlike Adobe's developer version, it doesn't restrict IP addresses, although the free version doesn't support SSL and cannot be used in commercial applications. If your application doesn't need SSL and is not commercial, then BlueDragon is a terrific alternative to Adobe's server. Another advantage is that you can actually deploy your application on your own server (as long as it's non-commercial).

In this article, I'll show you how to install and configure the BlueDragon web server and write a very simple ColdFusion application. These instructions are very much targeted toward developers who are experimenting with ColdFusion-style development for the first time.

First up, let's talk about the differences in the CFML (Cold Fusion Markup Language) support provided for BlueDragon and for the official Adobe server. Some tags are unsupported (although often this is with good reason, as they're either deprecated or obsolete), some are supported with minor differences (often in the form of options that can be passed to the tag), and some include enhancements to Adobe's implementation. For the most up-to-date compatibility information, visit New Atlanta's documentation page for the BlueDragon Server.

One other important point to note is that BlueDragon doesn't currently support CFMX8. So if you're working through a ColdFusion-based tutorial using BlueDragon, be sure to keep this point -- and the tag compatibility differences mentioned above -- in mind.

Installing BlueDragon

Now that you're aware of the differences between BlueDragon and Adobe's implementation of CFML, we can install the BlueDragon server and start experimenting. Visit New Atlanta's download page for BlueDragon to download the installer. The free version that I'll assume you're running throughout this article is located at the very bottom of the page. While this article only covers the installation of the Windows version, installers are available for Mac and Linux as well. Installation instructions for other platforms are available on the documentation page.

The install process is straightforward -- you'll be asked to agree to the software license and decide where you want the server to be installed. One screen will ask you for the port number that you wish to run the web server on. The default port is 8080, but you can choose another port if necessary (other development environments, like Ruby On Rails, also use this port for their internal web servers). You also have the option to integrate your BlueDragon server with another web server, as shown in Figure 1.

If you're just getting started with ColdFusion-style development, it's a good idea to stick with the built-in BlueDragon server, rather than using Apache or IIS, in case you hit any compatibility hurdles.

Another installation step will ask you for your password; since the free BlueDragon Server doesn't support SSL, it's a good idea to choose a password that you haven't used on other systems (consider using a site like https://www.goodpassword.com to create a random string). Once the installation is complete, the BlueDragon admin console will launch in your web browser. You should see a login form, shown in Figure 2, at which point you can enter the admin password that you specified during the installation process.

Once you've logged in, you'll see the main console page, shown in Figure 3. The ins and outs of this console are beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that this is where all of the main settings for the BlueDragon web server are contained.

Now that our server is set up, it's time to write some code to see how well it operates.

Checking the Web Server

To verify that pages other than the admin console are being rendered correctly, open a new tab in your web browser and type the following URL into your address bar: http://localhost:8080/. If you changed the default port from 8080, use your custom port number instead. The list of variables shown in Figure 4 should display.

If you have some experience with web servers, you're probably wondering where the index file that's responsible for this page is stored. The document root of the BlueDragon server can be found in the directory in which BlueDragon was installed, under the folder wwwroot. For a default installation on Windows, the document root is the folder C:\BlueDragon_Server_70\wwwroot. In this directory you'll find a file called index.cfm. This is the file that was parsed by the BlueDragon server in order to produce the page in Figure 4.

If you open this file in a text editor, you'll see a bunch of HTML as well as a number of tags beginning with cf. This is CFML -- the core language of ColdFusion. If you haven't dealt with ColdFusion development before, this code may not make much sense to you, but fear not -- we'll walk through it now.

Before we analyze this code, or write any code of our own, let's get set up with a decent code editing tool.