Help with Coldfusion 9

Question

Just downloaded Coldfusion 9 developer for review purposes. I am at the administrator page 127.0.0.1:8300 and I think everything has worked fine. I want to do a simple "Hello World" example. One tutorial gave me a simple 6 line script to do this and it looks pretty simple and understandable. I went to notepad and created the following:

Hello World #ucase("hello world")#

It told me to save it as helloworld.cfm in inetpub/wwwroot directory. I could not find such a directory on my system. So I saved it to C:\helloworld.cfm. Then it told me to go to my browser and type http://localhost/helloworld.cfm. I got something to the effect of a page not found error. Any help you can spare here.

Secondly, and more importantly, exactly where do I really need to be to be to create and run the above helloworld.cfm script above? Is there another tool I must have to create the above script to do this? I also understand that there is very little tutorial documentation on Coldfusion 9, why is that the case. Can you offer me any suggestions. I would really like to use this development tool. Adobe says it is the easiest development tool out there. You will have a tough time convincing me of that at this stage, however, I just might be missing a procedural/processing step thats real simple. I hope this is the case. Thanks for you valuable time.

JM

Answer 1

http://localhost/ will point to where your web server is configured. So obvious question is did you configure a web server such as IIS or Apache? Which OS are you using and which install of ColdFusion did you pick (standard, multiserver, other...)?

If you don't want to use an external web server you can use the built-in one, I have never really used it much but here is a link that should get you going: http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/8/htmldocs/help.html?content=webservmgmt_3.html

To create CFM files you can use pretty much any editor, the most popular one is Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/) coupled with the CFEclipse plugin (http://www.cfeclipse.org/). Adobe now has a IDE based on Eclipse called CFBuilder (http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/cfbuilder/features/) which is gaining speed quickly, but it is not free.

Answer 2

When you installed ColdFusion did you hook it up to a webserver or did you install it in standalone mode? Did you install it as standard ColdFusion or Multiserver?

The reason I ask is that depending on how you installed it will determine where you will find the web root.

For example, ColdFusion standard in stand alone mode will have the web root under something like C:\ColdFusion9\wwwroot Multiserver standalone will be something like C:\Jrun4\servers\cfusion\cfusion-ear\cfusion-war\

Installation with a connection to a web server will have asked you where you server's web root is and so on

To create scripts; notepad, but there are two eclipse based IDEs you might like to try. CFEclipse is free and ColdFusion Builder is adode's commercial product.

Answer 3

First of all, Welcome to the ColdFusion community!

I believe Jerry has done a default ColdFusion install. The CFAdmin URL as mentioned is 8300, so i guess it is a multi server installation.

As pointed out by stephen, your web root would be something like \Jrun4\servers\cfusion\cfusion-ear\cfusion-war\

You need to place your helloworld.cfm in the above path.

I recommend ColdFusion builder/ CFEclipse to start with.

CF is a easy language, you will realize that soon :)

Answer 4

Packt has published a book on ColdFusion called "ColdFusion 9 Developer Tutorial". You can find it here: https://www.packtpub.com/coldfusion-9-developer-tutorial/book