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Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. An overview of Ajax user interface layout tags
  3. New Ajax controls for creating user interfaces
  4. New Ajax controls for data manipulation

An overview of Ajax features in ColdFusion 8

An overview of Ajax user interface layout tags

The basic elements that make up an AJAX application include:

  • HTML and CSS for the presentation and formatting of the application.
  • JavaScript which enables you to script client-side behaviors.
  • Asynchronous communication is leveraged through the XMLHttpRequest function. This is an API used by JavaScript to transfer XML, JSON, and text from a web server using the HTTP protocol.
  • XML or JSON is used as a format for transferring data.

The new Adobe ColdFusion Ajax features can be divided into three categories:

  • Application interface layout
  • Data binding.
  • Server-side components (to be covered in a future article)

If you already have experience building web applications using Ajax technologies, you will find these new tags to be a simpler and more productive way of constructing your applications. If you have not been exposed to Ajax before, these new features are a great way to get started creating richer experiences.

Before diving into examples of how these new tags work, let’s take a quick tour of new ColdFusion tags and existing ColdFusion tags that now are able to leverage Ajax capabilities.

The following tags enable you to quickly lay out your Ajax user interface:

  • CFLAYOUT: Allows four different types of layout:
    • Horizontal
    • Vertical
    • Free form
    • Tabbed display
  • CFLAYOUTAREA: Use this tag inside of your CFLAYOUT tag to define different regions.
  • CFPOD: Creates a pod on the screen with a title bar in which you have the option of specifying a label.
  • CFWINDOW: If you have used Flex before, this Ajax component is similar the to <mx:TitleWindow/>. It acts as a pop-up window that can be shown or hidden using scripting. CFWINDOW can also be set to enable resizing.
  • CFMENU: Create a horizontal or vertical menu with this easy-to-use tag.
  • CFMENUITEM: Use this tag inside your CFMENU tag to add items to your menu.
  • CFTOOLTIP: Easily create tool tips in your application to enable a better user experience. You can even add HTML formatting to the tooltip for a better appearance.
  • CFAJAXPROXY: Creates a JavaScript proxy between your client side JavaScript and ColdFusion components. It takes care of serializing values into JSON format returning from a CFC call.
  • CFINPUT: This is an existing tag with a great new feature called autosuggest. You can program a static list of options, or bind the autosuggest attribute to a CFC to get suggestion data from a data source.

Moreover, there is a new ColdFusion/Ajax Application Wizard. Similar to the ColdFusion/FLEX wizard, the ColdFusion/Ajax wizard plug-in for Eclipse enables you to rapidly create rich, data-driven applications that require no coding from you. Once you have RDS configured in Eclipse with connection to your Adobe ColdFusion 8 server, you can build CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) based applications that leverage the Adobe ColdFusion 8 Ajax capabilities

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