what can coldfusion do?

Hi,
im into dreamweaver and am good at html...i tried learning php and mysql but find it a little hard going. Was wondering what coldfusion can do as an alternative to using php and mysql.

any info greatly appreciated

thx

well if you know php you can make a basic cold fusion page in minutes. for example here is a bit of code below that would go between ur body tags.

<cfset textexample = "Hello, this is my first ColdFusion example.">

<cfoutput>#textexample#</cfoutput>



that was just a quick example of what it can do now here is a quick query in cold fusion. one quick note is that cold fusion has the ability to datasource (give data names to databases) databases. what that simply means is that cold fusion virtually does all of the access variables for you. here is an example of a query and output of that query in cold fusion.

<cfquery name="examplequery" datasource="dsname1" blockfactor="100">
SELECT *
FROM test_table
</cfquery>

<cfoutput query="examplequery">#test_columb#</cfoutput>

read up on querys and the likes, just look on macromedia.com, they have free tutorials and documentations of cold fusion functions.

You can use CFMX with almost any database. So if learning MySQL is too tough use Microsoft Access. It is easy to use and simple to update. It creates large file sizes but with 80-200GB harddrives, 3GB RAM, 3.8GHZ processors who cares huh??? No really though learning ColdFusion is pretty easy and you say you are cool with Dreamweaver so thats a plus. Dreamweaver is built to make coding in CFMX a breeze. It has tag helpers, pre-built tag inserts and a lot of internal documentation to help you through the CFMX laerning process.