Understanding Site Definition Requirements
ColdFusion calls the authoring version of pages that contain CFML templates . That is, a ColdFusion template is the page that you create and that resides on the server, but which is never seen by the user.Now that you understand the basic process, you can see why you can't just open a completed version of the site in your browser right off the CD, as you could with the Jade Valley site. The browser would not understand the ColdFusion script inside. What's missing is the server. To view ColdFusion pages, whether they're already published on the Web or while you're developing them, they need to be processed on a server that contains ColdFusion. In other words, before you can even see the pages you create, they have to be saved on a Web server. This requirementthat pages must be saved on a server in order to be viewedhas tremendous implications for site setup in Dreamweaver. You can't simply place your local and remote file folders willy-nilly on your hard drive, as you can with static Web sites.When you're developing dynamic sites in Dreamweaver, you typically have two versions of your site. The local version of your site sits anywhere on your hard drive; these are the files you actively work on. The remote version of your site sits on the server; these are the files you actually test in the browser. When defining a dynamic site in Dreamweaver, you'll often be defining more than one version of the site, and providing Dreamweaver with information about how to access these files in different ways (via the file system for opening and saving files; via HTTP for testing functionality).The ColdFusion installer comes with a built-in server that will act as our local server (a server right on your computer) for this kind of testing.