Technology glossary

It's tempting to write these descriptions for people like ourselves, but instead, this is aimed at people with no web knowledge. Let us know if we've succeeded or failed at that!

ColdFusion

ColdFusion* allows the magic to happen on a website.

The simplest way to show you what CF can do is with an example.

Let's suppose you have a website and you wish to show today's date somewhere on the page. The following code:

<p>Today's date is 06.07.2009</p>

Would produce the following text to the user:

Today's date is 06.07.2009

What about tomorrow?

Well, you could go into the page and change the date... every day... forever!

However, if this were a ColdFusion page, we could do the following:

<p>Today's date is #DateFormat(Now(), "dd.mm.yyyy")#</p>

Which would also result in:

Today's date is 06.07.2009

Come tomorrow, they'll be no need to update the page. Instead, ColdFusion works its magic and the date will automatically change to:

Today's date is 07.07.2009

ColdFusion is akin to PHP, ASP, ASPX and JSP, which you may have heard of.

You can tell if a site is built with ColdFusion because the file names will end in .cfm.

* without wanting to confuse matters, ColdFusion is actually a product by Adobe, Macromedia before them and Allaire before them, the technology is really CFML but it's commonly refered to as ColdFusion, even by those in the know.

HTML

The page you're reading now is displayed to you using HTML.

Special tags are used to "mark-up" text, images and other media.

To see what is looks like, right-click on this page (away from any image) and select 'View source', 'View page source' or something similar. It changes depending on the browser you are using. What you'll see is the HTML used to create this page.

As a basic example, to make a paragraph of text appear as a paragraph on a web page you would do the following:

<p>This is a paragraph. It has been marked as such with the p tag.</p>

The <p> denotes the start of the paragraph, the corresponding </p> denotes the end of the paragraph.

View the source of this page and look for paragraph. You should find quite a few.

JavaScript

After HTML, the next most common technology on the web has to be JavaScript.

What is JavaScript?

Click here to see an example, you'll no doubt have seen this many times on other websites.

Why might JavaScript be important?

JavaScript can be used to heighten a user's experience when using a website.

Try typing letters and numbers into this text field below.

With JavaScript we can help users input the correct data.

We can also offer the user more intuitive ways to enter data than the standard HTML forms allow.

ENTER CALENDAR EXAMPLE HERE

jQuery

jQuery is a JavaScript library.

It allows web developers to do more with less code and hence less time.

The calendar in the JavaScript example above was created with one line of code using jQuery:

$("#date").calendar();

So what would have taken an age to write now takes seconds thanks to the clever people who created the jQuery libraries.