How I got started in ColdFusion

Hopefully I'm not too late to do this! A lot of people have been blogging recently about how they got started with ColdFusion. This was all started by Steve Bryant on his blog. August 1st is ColdFusion Day!

In 2001, the IEE (now The IET) were redeveloping their website. They chose ColdFusion as the platform - at that time, version 4.5 was out and 5 was on the horizon.

For their CMS, they chose Allaire Spectra. This was a pretty fledgling product with a lot of problems. However, it was felt that it the most 'open' solution that could be extended for their needs.

They hired Logica CMG to build the site and, soon after, I started to be trained up on CF to be the resident, in-house developer. Great times - training courses with Highlander, mentoring (of a sort) from the Logica people.

About 2 weeks after the completion of the project, Spectra was purchased by Macromedia and subsequently mothballed. Bit shit out of luck, really. So, the race was on for us, the in-house team (of 2) to get Spectra stable enough to use properly. The key to this was NOT to view the entire site model. ;-) This crashed the site, which was splendid as it was the way our content creators had been taught to use the system.

So, that was the start of my experience with ColdFusion. I loved the language, hated Spectra. I'm now using CF8 (although I've also used CF9 in anger) and couldn't be happier.

My recommendation for a toolkit? Eclipse, CFEclipse, SQL Server (or MySQL, that works too), an MVC framework (currently I use my own which is called Coyote, cos I just HATE Fusebox!), jQuery, iText and Lucene (not Solr - my own development using the original Java libraries.)

Long live ColdFusion!