Exercise 2: Setting up your development environment

If you are running ColdFusion in a Windows environment, Macromedia recommends that you use Macromedia Dreamweaver MX for ColdFusion development; however, if you are running ColdFusion in a UNIX environment, you should use the text editor that you prefer. Although Dreamweaver MX offers features that help you create ColdFusion applications quickly and easily, you can still follow the steps of the tutorial by entering or copying the code examples into your editor.

Note: To use the Dreamweaver Extensions included with ColdFusion MX 7, you must use Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 version 7.0.1.

About Macromedia Dreamweaver MX

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX is the preferred development environment for building ColdFusion MX 7 applications. It supports the latest ColdFusion MX 7 features, and it combines superior code editing features with the visual design features of Dreamweaver. You can build ColdFusion MX 7 applications by writing the code manually or generating the code by using one of the code-generating tools provided with Dreamweaver MX. In addition, ColdFusion MX 7 provides extensions to Dreamweaver that let you perform some administrative tasks without leaving the Dreamweaver environment and generate code for some of the most common tasks you encounter when creating a ColdFusion application.

With Dreamweaver MX, you can author and test your application code from a local or remote client. You can save your code directly to the server computer where ColdFusion is installed. The following sections provide an overview of Dreamweaver MX, and information on how to configure Dreamweaver MX for ColdFusion development.