CF-Associated Acronyms
While almost anything related to computers and/or software seems to accrue acronyms faster than picnics draw ants, not a lot of them are ColdFusion-specific...at least not without the addition of ColdFusion's 'CF'. My research led me to believe that the ColdFusion people coined the acronym WDDX (Web Distributed Data Exchange - see below for definition), then promptly appended the CF tag to make it CFWDDX. Of course, HTML becomes CFML, and virtually every HTML tag turns into a CFML tag with the addition, again, of the CF tag. (Aaargh!)

In the absence of ColdFusion-specific acronyms, I offer a selection encountered in the process of researching the subject, arranged below in alphabetical order:


API - Application Programmer's Interface
How the user (application programmer) interacts with the software.

ASP - Active Server Pages
Microsoft's competitive product to ColdFusion

CF - ColdFusion
Append the intials 'CF' to a wide variety of tags
and software concepts, and they become the ColdFusion version of whatever they were.

CFML - ColdFusion Markup Language
The ColdFusion version of HTML.

CFWDDX - See WDDX below

COM - Component Object Model
A Microsoft-created concept employed in object-oriented languages; an architecture that promotes reuseable software components.

CORBA - Common Object Request Broker Architecture
Similar to COM, but an industry standard concept rather than a Microsoft device.

IDE - Integrated Development Environment
A package that bundles together interface, compiler, specialized coding, etc. for speed and utility in software development.

IIS - Internet Information Server
The Web server software included with Microsoft Windows NT.

ODBC - Open Database Connectivity
The ability of a piece of database software to be compatible with almost any database management system.

SQL - Sequential Query Language
Microsoft's database language.

VTML - Visual Tool Markup Language
A family of markup languages used to extend the IDE of HomeSite and ColdFusion Studio.

WDDX - Web Distributed Data Exchange
A means of moving data structures using only HTTP. See FAQs for more information about WDDX.

XML - Extensible Markup Language
A tag-based language of which HTML is a subset. XML, in turn, is a subset of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language).