Chapter 5. Application, Session, and Request Scope

There is a huge difference between a web application and a dynamic web page. Web applications persist basic information, so we can create things such as shopping carts, user authentication (login and logout), and much more. HTML helps us to click through pages with links. In this chapter, we will learn how we can use web server memory to create engaging and interactive web applications by using variable scopes.

Further, we are going to discover the differences between application, session, and request scopes. We will learn how to share some information and how to protect the rest of the information in a controlled manner. In this chapter, we will have a look at the following topics:

• The life expectancy for various types of information. This affects the system memory and the place where different information is stored.

• The Application.cfc object class—the cornerstone of ColdFusion applications.

• The special standard method events, which ColdFusion...