Into the Cold

Upon starting at FORGE I was introduced to the Adobe’s ColdFusion platform.  Having no experience with ColdFusion I thought it would be best to learn the language and complete a project before making any judgments. I had heard of ColdFusion before but since it was run on a propriety application server I had never looked at it seriously. (I am a huge fan of open source.) Since my background is java and tuning the underlying JVM I thought that I would be able to pick it up quickly. For the most part I was correct. Since ColdFusion started out being marketed towards people who knew HTML the syntax was easy to pick up.

The one thing that really stood out to me about ColdFusion was that it was marketed as “software that enables developers to rapidly build, deploy and maintain robust Internet Applications”. Upon first reading this I was wondering what makes a platform rapid? Most of the time when you hear the work rapid in software development you think of process not the language or platform. So I set out to try and determine what made ColdFusion declare it self as rapid. The answer is amazingly simple, Adobe has been able to take some of the things that make other platforms complicated and abstract them a little. The two items that I noticed right away is database interaction and ajax calls.

To make sure that I point out both sides of the story ColdFusion does go a little far in abstracting some things and it some cases does not seem to stand on it own. The other thing that I noticed is that since people thought about ColdFusion as rapid this can lead to sloppy code. Also one of the things that I initially loved about ColdFusion is that it integrates with java natively, it should as it is built on java. On my first project I wrote several pieces of functionality in java and integrated the two via a interface layer I created. I ended up not being happy with the this solution and rewrote all of the code in ColdFusion. I can see how this would be great to incorporate if ColdFusion did not offer a specific piece of functionally but for simple things this seems to complicate things more than my liking.

One of the roles that I have is to determine our preferred platform for web development. As I move forward I am going to explore other solutions (ruby, python) on real projects before making a decision, but ColdFusion will be considered. Even if ColdFusion becomes something that I ultimately move away from I do think that it has been a good learning experience.

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