Macromedia ColdFusion MX brings a whole new set of features and advantages to web development—silky-smooth Flash integration, way-cool support for web services and other groovy stuff that will surely make the lives of ColdFusion developers easier and more interesting. One of the neatest new features in ColdFusion MX, and one which forms the basis for many of its other new features, is its native support for XML.

This new functionality makes the task of working with XML—something that can be quite complicated or cumbersome in other languages—remarkably simple and straightforward. Suddenly a whole bunch of XML-related tasks just became ridiculously easy.
ColdFusion MX supports XML in three basic areas:
• Parsing existing XML
• Generating new XML
• Transforming XML through XSLT

Note: This article assumes that you have at least some familiarity with XML. At its simplest, XML can be defined as syntax for marking up data with “tags,” similar to the HTML and CFML tags that you know and love. These tags (called elements in XML) can have all kinds of different names, depending on what they describe (perhaps and , and , and so forth). If you want to learn more, I suggest reading O’Reilly’s xml.com site and read at least their “Introduction to XML” section, after clicking “What Is XML?” on the home page.

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