As a kid growing up, I lived on a military base in Hawaii. Behind my house there was a huge hill called Radar Hill. To the military, it was the ideal location for radar surveillance stations. But to the children of the neighborhood, it was the Ultimate Challenge, and anyone who could bike down it successfully became a legend.
When I was 7 years old, I made my first-ever attempt at descending Radar Hill on a skateboard. I remember starting my descent, feeling the wind in my face, and thinking, "This is going to be great!" But then as I picked up speed - and the board shook and the wheels screeched - I realized I had made a terrible mistake. That was just before I ate it.
Now, I can see you scratching your heads, wondering what the hell this has to do with ColdFusion forms. Well, it illustrates a point: If your tools are not suited to your task, you're likely to eat it when your project picks up speed.
HTML forms were created for a simple purpose: user input. Look back through the HTML specs that have come and gone and see how forms are described. You will find language like "fill out forms," "user input forms," and so forth. Back in 1994, in the simpler times of yore, that was really the only purpose forms had to serve.
But in the space of a few years, the Web grew from a small town into a big city, and the Web became the place for applications development. The old HTML form just wasn't cutting it anymore. Welcome to Radar Hill.
A solution was needed. In July 1995, ColdFusion, a product from J. J. and Jeremy Allaire, was created. If you read Charles' Introduction, you already know that ColdFusion has a simple tag syntax that's both powerful and easy to learn. And, most important, it provides an easy way to connect to a backend database.
And with this great tool, there are ways to make a new kind of form that is far more dynamic and responsive. The modern form, created with ColdFusion, has five key characteristics:
- Data awareness
- Validation
- Memory
- Robustness
- Adaptability
Now, I have always advocated learning by doing. So to show you how forms have changed, I thought it might be fun to take a primitive HTML form and modernize it, adding each of these features step by step. In order to do this, we need to create a sample application. Luckily, I just happen to have one in mind. We'll set the stage on page 2.
But first, if you don't have ColdFusion running, you can go ahead and download both ColdFusion Server 4.0 and ColdFusion Studio 4.0 from Allaire.
We're going to work with this database and create this set of files. Feel free to download them here and poke around.
next page»
