Installation guide

2.2 Migration from ColdFusion to BlueDragon
While this document covers issues of CFML language compatibility, additional informa-
tion about migration from ColdFusion to BlueDragon is provided in the BlueDragon
User Guide, in the Section “Migration from ColdFusion”. Developers are strongly
encouraged to review that material, and indeed all the information presented in the User
Guide.
2.3 Enhancements to CFML in BlueDragon
A significant portion of this guide is devoted to detailing information about enhance-
ments or additions to CFML that are available in BlueDragon. These include (but are not
limited to):
• new tags and functions (such as
CFIMAP, CFIMAGE, CFASSERT, and CFDEBUGGER, to
name a few)
• enhancements to existing tags (such as a new
CACHENAME attribute for CFQUERY,
and the option to leave off
VAR on CFDUMP)
• changes in behavior of language-oriented features (such as page buffering behav-
ior)
These additions or enhancements are provided in direct response to customer feedback, to
provide important and needed benefits.
3 Variables
3.1 Variable Names
In ColdFusion, a variable name must start with a letter and can only contain letters, num-
bers and the underscore (_) character. In BlueDragon, a variable name may additionally
contain the dollar sign ($) character and a variable name may start with an underscore,
dollar sign, or letter.
BlueDragon follows CFMX as a model in its handling of variables containing periods in
their names. Both act differently than CF5 in this respect.
3.2 CFML Keywords/Reserved Words
ColdFusion resources caution developers to avoid use of keywords as variable or user-
defined function names. Even so, there are instances where ColdFusion will permit use of
some keywords in variable names when BlueDragon will not.
For instance, both ColdFusion and BlueDragon will fail if you attempt to create a vari-
able named “mod”, which is a logical operator used to perform a modulus operation
(often used in a
CFIF statement). However, ColdFusion will let you use the variable if
you define it in a scope other than the local (variables) scope, such as
URL.mod. The
following code works in ColdFusion but fails in BlueDragon:
BlueDragon 6.1 CFML Compatibility and Reference Guide 3