Authoring dynamic pages

Authoring a dynamic page consists of writing the HTML first, and then adding the server-side scripts or tags to the HTML to make the page dynamic. When you view the resulting code, the language appears embedded in the page’s HTML. Accordingly, these languages are known as HTML embedded programming languages. The following basic example uses ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML):

<html>
   <head>
      <title>Trio Motors Information Page</title>
   </head>
   <body>
      <h1>About Trio Motors</h1>
      <p>Trio Motors is a leading automobile manufacturer.</p>
      <!--- embedded instructions start here --->
      <cfset department="Sales">
      <cfoutput>
      <p>Be sure to visit our #department# page.</p>
      </cfoutput>
      <!--- embedded instructions end here --->
   </body>
</html>

The embedded instructions on this page perform the following actions:

Create a variable called department and assign the string "Sales" to it.
Insert the variable’s value, "Sales", in the HTML code.

The application server returns the following page to the web server:

<html>
   <head>
      <title>Trio Motors Information Page</title>
   </head>
   <body>
      <h1>About Trio Motors</h1>
      <p>Trio Motors is a leading automobile manufacturer.</p>
      <p>Be sure to visit our Sales page.</p>
   </body>
</html>

The web server sends the page to the requesting browser, which displays it as follows:

About Trio Motors

Trio Motors is a leading automobile manufacturer.

Be sure to visit our Sales page.

You choose a scripting or tag-based language to use depending on the server technology available on your server. Here are the most popular languages for the five server technologies supported by Dreamweaver:

Server technology	Language
ColdFusion	ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML)
ASP.NET	Visual Basic C#
Active Server Pages (ASP)	VBScript JavaScript
Java Server Pages (JSP)	Java
PHP	PHP

For more information, see Choosing a server technology.

Dreamweaver can create the server-side scripts or tags necessary to make your pages work, or you can write them by hand in the Dreamweaver coding environment.