Jared Rypka-Hauer, Lead ColdFusion Developer, Minneapolis, MN

Yesterday is a blur... reading this wishlist and that wishlist, comment after comment, shout-outs, disagreements, arguments. It was awash in a sea of strong and conflicting emotions, and, in the middle of it all, I posted comments about wishlists and "sides" and...

So I got in the car this morning and I was thinking back to the days when I had first started using CF. OMG... look at that! Data from a DB on-screen! It's so easy to do things with CF!!

CFFORM generates JAVASCRIPT!! OMG HOW COOL IS THAT!! What's more it'll data data from a DB and make selects for you, AND it builds your validation (which, if you need to customize, is fairly easy to do too!) Even CFINSERT and CFUPDATE were pretty damned hot, when you could use them, because they did it all for you. No thinking, just doing.

Click link, see data, view data, submit form, confirmation page, forwarded to home. It was just a giddy, happy moment when my desires were accomplished within the confines of a web browser like Netscape 3. Wheeeeeeeeeeee!

CFMAIL... there's a winner. The only other tool I'd seen to send mail was a CGI mailer of limited capabilities.

CFLOOP... now with collections, lists, counts, queries... good lord, one loop for structures, one loop for lists, one loop run by a counter, one by a query. One tag to spawn them all. One control structure to remember, with slight syntactical variations (like item for collections and index for lists??) but still... it does it's job very well.

So we hit 2005 and I get allllll excited about OO and CFCs and frameworks and toooooooooools (I'm a tool junkie anyway), and programmer speak and design patterns... somehow I seem to have come disconnected from the thing that made CF different than Java, ASP, VB, CGI or WSAPI programming... the level of automation and just plain "WOW, that's sweet, less work for me!"

Don't get me wrong, there comes a time when you need to either take a step up and start building better, more structured, more professional applications. But the true allure of CF is the stuff it does for you, the things we eventually start taking for granted... cfftp, cfldap, cfquery and cfoutput, cfmail and cfform. It's just awesome stuff.

SO maybe Brian Kotek wasn't quite as far off as I thought at first. Of course, re-reading his post a few times and trying to think past my gut reactions to keywords in his post, the comments, and finally reading the last paragraph of the post (how did I miss it before?) made a big difference.

I suppose that's what the blog world is all about... reading, re-reading, making each other really think things thru and, in the end, communicating with more people than we could in any combination of face-to-face encounters... in the long run it's a good thing.

Great post!

I always cringe when I have to work on old ASP or PERL code. I'm always amazed at how 'hard' it is compared to doing the same thing in CF.

I don't there is anything wrong with CF being considered a 'simple' language. I'd hate to see it get over-complicated where people loose that 'this is so easy' feeling. Maybe CF isn't for huge scale enterprise applications? So what? There are so many languages out there now I think there is room for everyone to have their spot.

Recently I watched a few of the Ruby on Rails videos - they gave me the same feeling I used to get with CF - that's SO EASY. Is it limited? Sure - but I don't think that's a bad thing.

Thanks Jared! I agree that my post hit some nerves, I knew that it would ahead of time. And I knew the biggest nerves that would be hit would be from the people who stand to lose the most if additional OO features are given a lower priority. Ironically, *I am also one of those people*. I'm just trying to think through all of the angles, and when I do, it seems like Adobe (and indeed, almost all CF developers) would get a whole lot more bang for their buck if the focus was on things with much more widespread impact.

Great perspective Jared. I hope you don't mind but I referenced your posting on my blog and used the "Java Lite" term. It was so appropriate. I hope we all never lose site of CF's ease of use.

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