
CFWheels 2.0 – ColdFusion Markup Language framework inspired by Rails - bdcravens
https://cfwheels.org/blog/cfwheels-2-0-released/
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Posibyte
Is there a captivating set of advantages or other reason to use ColdFusion
compared to any of the more common languages today?1 I'd love to play with
this and learn something new if it brings something interesting and different
to the table.

1: Of course, other than leveraging existing CF knowledge.

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moduspol
We used it at my last job a few years ago, and it was pretty easy to get
people who aren't normally even coders to build a ColdFusion page. We used it
for the university's intranet and it was very good for making simple internal
CRUD web apps that various members of our team could understand / troubleshoot
/ maintain easily.

One of the defining features of ColdFusion is the tag-based syntax. You can
have a single "web page" file in, say, "my-widgets.cfm". It can then have a
mix of HTML and CFML tags that lay out the page, which would include an SQL
query of a database and the HTML being output for each row. Other languages
have templating, but this is more like a core feature of the language.

By default, it's also got that PHP style of "just upload a file and open it in
your web browser" that makes it simple. So if someone else wanted to make a
page like my "my-widgets.cfm", they could simply duplicate it with a different
name and make changes until it's ready to go. This lets you turn around
internal web apps very quickly that, you know, does in realtime what an
administrative assistant does in a week with an Excel spreadsheet.

I use Python now and I certainly recommend it, but it wouldn't be as simple to
jump right into as a barely-techie. Same with modern PHP (on something like
Laravel). Earlier PHP would be similar, but ColdFusion's <cfquery>
functionality is so easy to use and so critical that it's really a big deal.
You don't need to know much ColdFusion to run a query and output the results
(safely even) in HTML.

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timsayshey
It's been a long road to 2.0 with lots detours but we've finally made it!
Thanks to an awesome dedicated team and community :)

Lol, and yes, asking if Coldfusion is still a thing is like asking if Java is
still a thing. It's a dynamic scripting language on the JVM that gets stuff
done. It's not going anywhere. If you had a bad perception of CF many years
ago, do yourself a favor and check out Lucee before making any comments, lest
you misrepresent the language and speak out of ignorance ;) -- Remember bad
code happens in every language

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rbanffy
> Remember bad code happens in every language

I remember writing a Windows service to reload the CF's DLL every time the
number of concurrent connections to ISS exceeded a certain threshold.

That happened, literally, in the past century, but Cold Fusion earned its bad
reputation at that time. I was glad when I saw most of the original plumbing
being ejected years later.

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bdcravens
Yeah, CF pre-2001 had an entirely different architecture (when it switched
from a static binary format to running atop the JVM ... lol it was a JVM
language before that was cool)

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rad_gruchalski
"from a static binary to a monolithic JVM app"

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wordpressdev
I did few projects in CF when it was the thing (before being acquired by Adobe
etc). Here's one project I did back in 2001-2. It was my country's first
jobsite for tech professionals. I was the web dev.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20020605022808/http://www.jobnox...](https://web.archive.org/web/20020605022808/http://www.jobnox.com)

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harel
It was a thing a good while back. In fact it was the first Application Server.
Still around early 2000s it was one of the best ways to create web
applications. And then it wasn't. What is interesting is that the Lucee
([http://lucee.org/](http://lucee.org/)) project doesn't even mention
ColdFusion or CFML in the first few pages.

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notjustanymike
Does anyone know if this is compatible with Fortran?

~~~
tempodox
Nope, it requires COBOL.

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rad_gruchalski
It's the new COBOL.

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gremlinsinc
is coldfusion still a thing in 2017?

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brixon
I doubt there are many new companies starting to use CF, but it was a good
option in 2001 when CF5 came out when compared to PHP4, ASP3, or CGI from
those days. Companies that have a decade of CF code is not going to just
replace it all because it is not the cool flavor of the week. It works and
generally does an OK job.

It has always been an approachable language to people that don't program full
time. It looks and feels like HTML, so novice programmers were productive
fairly quickly in CF. Career programmers tend to not like it since it is
verbose and restrictive, but I have know numerous people use CF as a jumping
point for programming and IT careers solving company problems with a bit of
code.

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rbanffy
Legacy code is a thing. I fear the merging of template and logic that CF
encouraged (and I don't think it's currently discouraged enough) results in
hard to test and hard to reutilize code.

Since hard to test and, hence, untestable codebases are the hardest to
migrate, I'd assume web applications that depend too much on Cold Fusion (or
PHP, ASP or Model 1 JSP) will remain in those technologies until the whole
thing is rewritten from scratch.

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neokoenig
CFWheels uses RoR MVC concepts, so separation from data/logic/display as you'd
expect. This (major) second version has it's own built in test suite for TDD,
RESTful routing etc, and the whole core has been written in CFScript which is
"tag free". My point being that any modern CFML web app can easily engage with
best practice development - that's of course not to say there aren't a lot of
legacy apps out there as you rightly mention.

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brixon
I'm not knocking CF, it put food on my dinner plate for many years. I used to
use fusebox (MVC with all the terms renamed) and had manageable code. I could
knock out a CF based web app much faster than I can today with C# ASP.NET. The
only reason we switched was the availability of developers willing to work on
CF. You can find C# people everywhere.

