Coldfusion Community on Fire

I really could of had a future in writing cheesy headlines for newspapers. Although this blog tends to be more for new ideas so much has been happening in the past week related to Coldfusion, it seems proper to give an update post on a few very interesting developments which I can see being extremely useful for developers and anyone considering Coldfusion alike. The first of which you’ve probably heard about by now — Coldfire . There are a few tools when developing at home I use constantly — Firefox, Eclipse/CfEclipse, Firebug (and a few other extensions to a lesser degree) and now Coldfire; that’s how big a deal it is. So what is it? Well if you use Firebug pull it up and follow along. You’ll notice in Firebug there’s a tab based setup with the first few being console, HTML, CSS, script, etc. Coldfire adds another ones to this list — ColdFusion. In order for this to work, you need to add a new “debug” file in your coldfusion folder on your dev site, and then set it up in CF Administrator, which only takes a click. What it shows includes query information, execution times and information from any cftrace calls you had during your page. If you’re unfamiliar with cftrace , you’re able to hit points in your ap you can check. One very cool thing about cftrace, Coldfire and specifically the custom debugger is that nothing at all is added to your application. If you’ve ever worked with Ajax and Coldfusion debugging you know how much of a pain it is to disable that each time you’re making an ajax request and need specific feedback. This should make dev with debugging easy as can be. Another hot new addition (the puns just keep coming) is GotCFM.com . This is a very simple site with one purpose — show who’s using Coldfusion and just generally evangelize it. There’s already 727 sites listed on there, which is just amazing progress. Can’t wait to have some sites to add of my own. The last item isn’t new exactly, but it is becoming important so I’ll admit it — I’m slowly falling for ColdBox . I’ve decided to give it a shot with a very simple ap I’m building that’ll use Coldbox/Coldspring/Reactor/Coldcourse/OpenID and, ideally, shouldn’t take too long. Due to the nature of some of it though I probably can’t do much with it until June. Either way Coldbox is definitely something you should look into when considering coldfusion frameworks. Although there’s not a huge developer community (yet), there’s amazing work out there as well as more documentation than I’ve had the chance to read. What’s been most amazing about Coldbox is just how easy it is to pick it up and get going. Yesterday after about an hour I had a simple login system using OpenID that saved users to a DB using a service layer generated by reactor/coldspring and with nice URLs from Coldcourse of course ;). Definitely looking forward to digging into some of the meat of the framework suhc as caching, internationalization and plugins next. If you’re wanting to get a little hyped up about Coldbox, there’s an interview with Luis Majano over at CFFrameworks.com .