How I Get Started in ColdFusion

Submitted by Falken on

Steve Bryant has decided that today is a good day for people to explain how they got started with ColdFusion, because it turns out people get started in all sorts of ways.

For me, I was at my first job out of Uni, way back in the 2000's. I was using Perl to build a reporting application that tied together details of consulting jobs from an Oracle database with scanned timesheets so that our customers could understand what was going on.

This was all well and good, but we wanted to offer other things, like being able to find consultants with particular skills, have timesheets recorded in real time online, and a bunch of other things.

We looked at several platforms to build our business on, some of which, like ColdFusion, are still alive and kicking, like Zend Studio and even some native Perl frameworks. We looked at ASP too, but that'd cost a fortune for a specific development tool and Windows servers.

We had a great chat with an Allaire (yes, Allaire, not even Macromedia, never mind those new upstart owners at Adobe !) rep in a hotel down the road, and the ease of getting a query out on to a page was so much better than anything else (and mostly still is) we got a licence very soon after. We nearly deployed Spectra !

And the rest, as they say, is history. I've worked for multi nationals and for myself, and although I've built things in Java (on Weblogic) as well as noodeled about with Perl, Python and the rest, I always end up missing ColdFusion, and now I can even use a free (beer and speech) ColdFusion implementation too !

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