Inside Technique : Introduction to ColdFusion Express for ASP Developers
By Scott Isaacs

We downloaded and starting playing with Allaire ColdFusion Express (Download From Allaire). ColdFusion Express is a light-weight downloadable version of Allaire ColdFusion. If you want to experiment or explore ColdFusion we highly recommend this download. We experienced no problems downloading or installing ColdFusion Express and it appears to be coexisting peacefully with our ASP files. Everything you create using ColdFusion Express is upward compatible with the Professional and Enterprise versions of ColdFusion.

The purpose of this article is to explore programming ColdFusion from the point-of-view of an ASP Developer. Our goal is not to evaluate the product but rather to learn and understand ColdFusion. In this article, we are performing a very simple task - create a basic guestbook application storing the guestbook in an Access Database.

Before we dig into the details, we are going to give a brief introduction to defining variables in both ASP and ColdFusion. This introduction highlights a key difference between the two models - ASP programming is built around traditional programming language constructs and ColdFusion is much closer to a mark-up language.

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