Rants on technology, Ruby on Rails, Javascript and UI Design by Adam Fortuna
If you’re looking for a good place to get started with Ant when it comes to deployment, check out Derek Perez’s recent post about Improving ColdFusion Deployment with Ant. He created a time saving script to do three main things: uncompiled deployment to my webroot, compiled deployment to my webroot and packaged deployment.
Everyone seems to be putting in their $0.02 when it comes to choosing a framework, so I thought I’d toss my change as well. It seemed to start with a post by Brian Rinaldi about how Overthinking Your Framework is a Stalling Tactic. He makes some very good points on this, and the often suggested idea of “making an application in each one, just to try them out”. Sean Corfield agrees, emphesizing the important part is making the decision more than anything else. After watching Brian Koteks presentation on framework agnostic model layers I couldn’t agree more on this subject.
So what framework should you use? That question really hasn’t been answered because there is no always true answer. If you want the most popular framework with the most jobs for it, use Fusebox. According to Indeed.com there are more than twice as many fusebox jobs than model-glue and mach-ii combined.
If you’ve never used a framework before, it’s also more intuitive to learn than Mach-II or Model-Glue (in my opinion at least), and with Fusebox 5 much of that same featureset can be incorparated later in one way or another using lexicons. That’s not to say I’m suggesting Fusebox for all situations by any means, but the most used, easiest to learn framework it certainly the obvious first target.
Why did I put Ruby on Rails on this chart? Well I’m sorry, it wasn’t to be cruel. One thing that Coldfusion seems to suffer from isn’t that we don’t have a good framework, but that we aren’t unified under one as Ruby is. Java has a few huge frameworks (and more than a few small ones), but they also have the numbers to support that many. With Coldfusion however, our numbers are so spread out between frameworks that nothing is gaining significantly. Take a closer look at the time when Ruby On Rails surpassed Fusebox for job postings…
At that time (May 2006) roughly 1 in 4 people using Ruby was also using Rails. For Coldfusion it was closer to 1 in 8.
Dig a little deeper into this data and you’ll one glaring statistic in this — 1 in 3 ruby programmers uses a framework! It’s probably much more than this actually, as there are surely jobs comming up with “ruby”. “Ruby programming” vs “Ruby On Rails” gives roughly 3 out of 4 people using rails for instance.
Looking at Coldfusion vs frameworks though, it’s a little more one sided…
We don’t use frameworks; or at least they’re not an important enough to put in a job description. It could also be because no Coldfusion frameworks are so confusing that a CF developer would have a hard time learning them. While both are true, based on some of the frameworks surveys I’ve read the total number of coldfusion developers not using frameworks is decreasing (there is currently a poll in progress at CFFrameworks.com on the subject). Of course the average blog reader is a lot more likely to be using a framework, so this isn’t an accurate picture of the Coldfusion community as a whole. From that graph I’d say maybe 1 in 6 Coldfusion jobs mentions a framework. It’s not a pretty sight seeing all that white space, so if you’re in doubt about whether or not to use a framework, just pick one. 
Oh yeah, and all those comparisons to Ruby? They were just for comparison of the community as a whole. Coldfusion has a larger base of programmers (although you’d never guess it by the general publics perception of Coldfusion), which makes it capable of supporting both a framework and a non-framework community. There are of course times when using a framework is just needlessly complicating things, which CF edges out the framework-driven approaches of just about any language in it’s ease of doing this. It’s also a curse if you never take the time to learn the skills to make the next step. I think John Ashenfelter put it best in his presentation at the Frameworks conference (paraphrased).
The debate between using a framework and not using a framework was over in the rest of the programming world long ago. Frameworks won.
Book 4: Coldfusion MX7 Certified Developer Study Guide
Ben Forta’s guide to getting Coldfusion certified
If you’re looking to get Coldfusion Certified there’s not too many products out there to help you. I wrote about the few I used of which this small but in depth book played an important role.
If you’re wondering just what a “Study Guide” is, it’s not hard to describe. Imagine the default programming book layout where the author goes through examples and extracts the ideas from each of the mini-lessons. This study guide is basically that same concept minus the demo examples. There is still code in short blocks of course, but most the code is self contained and not part of a greater chapter all using that same code.
As for the chapters themselves they are surprisingly short. For instance there’s a chapter on Coldfusion Components (CFCs) that measures in at a mere 15 pages. Other chapters are equally brief: Lists (6 pages), Locking (4 pages) and Session Management (8 pages). The important part of these chapters isn’t in the details, but in a very quick description. When studying for the test, I was able to reread entire chapters on subjects I was missing questions in in almost no time at all.
I should point out that this book isn’t meant for learning these topics from scratch. If you’re wanting that, you’d be better off with the Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Web Application Construction Kit (Wact). If you’re already a Coldfusion developer and want to see what subjects you have a limited understanding of this is a great read though. At 444 pages of content, many of those being blank pages between the 50 short chapters or quiz pages at the end of each, it doesn’t seem like a very long reference book.
At the end of each chapter there are a few multiple choice questions relating to that chapter. These questions help solidify the material immensely. In the back of the book are all of the answers to these questions as well as a descriptions of the answers as well. These are the same questions that are available on Ben Forta’s Study Guide Quiz online. There are certainly a good way of measuring your initial ability, and if you find yourself unsure at least there’s only ~8 pages of material covered to brush up on.
The one thing I did believe this book lacked was more test questions at the end of each chapter. There are usually only 3-5 questions, which become easily remembered. Although this means you know these 3-5 very well, the rest of the topics from the chapters fade more easily. It would’ve been nice to see a larger question pool, or perhaps more questions available in the online study guide quiz results with reference page numbers which could then be expanded at any time. I like the idea of an accompanying website with tests, but don’t believe it was used to it’s potential in this case. If you’re looking for a more thorough practice test, I’d suggest getting a hold of Centrasofts CFMX Exam Buster 7.0.
I’d say if you’re planning on getting certified this is a must have resource. Even after certification though it serves as sort of a bulging-pocket reference sort of book where the meat from any topic can be obtained in far less time than with the WACT book. Still though, no book can offer a guarantee, so best to read what you can from other sources as well, although I’d have to say this is the best starting point I can imagine.
My rating: stars
