Monday, August 01, 2011

How I got started in ColdFusion

Just a quick post, on today's Coldfusion meme - How I got started in ColdFusion

I first started with Coldfusion 2.0 back in 1996 whilst working in my first IT job
at a recruitment agency. I had been playing with assembler, basic, html and C on all sorts
of platforms from CP/M, SunOS, Linux and PC's.

I was tasked with developing a website for the company, to post available jobs and allow
candidates to upload resumes. I had started working with Perl, but soon was getting
annoyed at Perl as it wasn't a great solution for building websites.

One night I was at home, surfing on dialup and I found a link to Allaire Coldfusion 2.0
on a shareware website. It was amazing stuff compared to Perl. Wanna send an email,
wrap it in CFMAIL, wanna do a query, wrap the SQL in CFQUERY. I was sold.


After I left that company, I signed up for an Advanced Coldfusion course which turned
out to be more like a Coldfusion 101. I filled out the feedback form afterwards with some
pretty strong but expletive free language.

About a week later, the Australian Distributor for Allaire, called me up while I was at a friends
place and told me I had been given a full refund and the offered me the Job as the Australian
ColdFusion Trainer. I contemplated it for a while and decided I'd rather cut code and build
apps than train people.

I'm still using it all these years later! 

Update: I just remembered, Google even evaluated CF back in the day,
but didn't like the <CFELSE> tag coz you couldn't parse CFML with an XML parser...







5 comments:

kerrib said...

so maybe you're the ideal person to tell me exactly why mentioning cf is often met with eye rolls, groans and an all round bad wrap?

Zac Spitzer said...

some simple reasons come to mind

1. Coldfusion is easy for people with a non programming background to get started with, i.e graphic designers which can lead to some pretty hideous coding styles

2. It's been around for so long that there is a lot of crappy old code written in the style of the early web

3. Developers can be very parochial about the technology they use!

4. Modern Coldfusion is java based and good developmers use advanced frameworks like ColdBox, Model Glue or FW/1, many of the detractors have no experience with these and perhaps have only seen the ugly old grand daddy of Fusebox

Big Mad Kev said...

I'm sure you mean dbmail and dbquery :)

Zac Spitzer said...

ah dbmail! I think cfmail was introduced with 2.0? I remember seeing a few of those db tags when I started

Kartar said...

Ah memories! I remember those heady days. I think I even cut some CF code back in those days... :)