asp.Net 3.5 is really great, but at the same time very huge, and thus might be much to handle. then again .net MVC looks really interestin and promising =D

I’ve pointed a couple of my junior programmers to this article as a good supplement for the training I give them.

Here’s one example: Junior programmer with basic HTML experience. 2 weeks of training time. His first solo project – gather info from a large amount of poorly generated XML data files, normalize the data, store in a SQL Database – generate multiple views of the data based on free-form search criteria (basically search on any field) as well as defined “views”.

Total time for his first working application (working being defined as it met ALL minimum requirements) – 3 days – SOLO. He’s spent a week (5 days) total on it now and added more than 10 additional views and search function capabilities as well as realtime notification of data “issues”. He’d never even SEEN ColdFusion til day 1. Is his code pretty or optimized yet – no. That’s what revision 2 is for.

In my world – we always – need a version to work RIGHT NOW – worry about optimization of code and clean-up in version 2. Our environment is fast paced, and we deal with multiple requirement generators for the same app. We never have 6 months to get the first revision of ANY app we write out the door – our turn around time for a first revision is always less than 10 days.

The only dev language for web apps that I have EVER been able to do that with is CF.

Thanks for providing the community with a GREAT tutorial article!

While there are sections of MySpace that are purely .NET, many original and new sections are built using CFML. Just go to the homepage and click on the Take a Tour link or most of the links under the More tab. Wherever you see “.cfm?fuseaction=”, that’s a ColdFusion page using the Fusebox MVC framework.

*CFML = ColdFusion Markup Language

Thank you very much

The built-in debugging is top notch. The forms and validation are beyond simple (and in themselves save me hours of work). The javascript generation is amazing (especially considering my dislike of js). And the CFCs I find much easier to grasp than I ever did the multi-tier model in PHP, and so I find my code is much cleaner. That being said, there was something beautifully logical about PHP’s requirement that you have a closing tag for EVERY tag, something that CF does not require, but you get used to it.

I found the best books to learn from were the Adobe ones, stating with the Adobe ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit Volume 1 (there’s also volume 2 and 3).

I’ve also played around with Railo and Open BlueDragon. They work superbly but do not have 100% compatibility with CF8 code, for instance Railo is missing the validateAt=”onServer” attribute for text inputs. And of course there are no Flash/Flex forms either, but that’s not a huge deal.

Great tut, lots of info. I’m actually following CF and Railo on my site as well. I wasn’t aware of the captcha function, will have to play with that

We punt Coldfusion on From the Couch when ever we can as it’s such a great language to work with; it’s easy to understand and since it’s tag and hash -based you can make super clean code too.

I think if you have your queries and includes set-up correctly, site deployment is really fast; comparable to wordpress even.

Great post

Here is my opinion about Coldfusion:

I love it, despite the hosting hurdles I think CF is great for beginners who are stepping into programming and there is clearly nothing wrong with it for professionals either.

We make our living by creating sites which use Coldfusion and we even managed to create two successful blogs with the language.

On top of that I think the language is a lot cleaner than PHP and also quicker in terms of creating a site from a blank page.

But each to their own. Its like Fireworks vs. Photoshop… each have their advantages and it just depends on you because they are both pretty capable programs.