beginner in coldfusion

[azmaliya]

hello there..
i'm beginner in coldfusion.. is there anyone can help me learn about it? do you can suggest me any tutorials or ebook that can help me?

thanx.. :)

[J.P]

Hi,

there are plenty of web sites on line that you should be able to learn something from.

http://www.applayit.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/cf_learn_fast_and_easy.menu/coldfusion.cfm

Would be one place to start... as for books;

http://www.bigwebmaster.com/ColdFusion/Books/

I would say these might help you. I believe I started off with the bible (bottom book) which did help me a lot.

Hope this helps a little.

JP

[Kaabi]

What exactly does ColdFusion do, what makes it so useful? Great name.

[J.P]

Coldfusion is a server side script so it will do the same as PHP in a sense (use data from a database etc).

It's not as common as PHP as it can cost a bit to get it installed on a server.

To be honest I've never really used PHP so I don't know what the main differences are other than PHP is free CF aint, no doubt some of the PHP uses might come here and answer your questions/slate CF :)

[Connect]

This might answer your question a bit
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/coldfusion/articles/php_cfmx.html

[mopacfan]

Why did you choose cold fusion? As far as I'm concerned, CF was a fad that never caught on.

[J.P]

:rolleyes:

There is still a lot of sites using CF and no doubt it will be around for a long time :)

[Nitin M]

Why did you choose cold fusion? As far as I'm concerned, CF was a fad that never caught on.
I program in many languages and CF is a great scripting based language. It may not have the shelf life of php or .net, but it still has a lot of life in it. IMHO it's still one of the most efficient languages to use when developing database centric websites.

[alph]

I used to code in CF a few years back...what really surprised me when asp.net came out, many of the features they included have been in Cold Fusion for YEARS.

I agree with Nitin, CF is easy to learn and fast to code in, but I gave it up as no one seemed to be using it and good hosting was hard to find.

[J.P]

Yeah finding a good host is very hard to come by, I think I was luck as I splashed a little amount of money for a life time hosting deal and they have coldfusion. I was very lucky :)

http://www.freshlookhosting.com/ is the company I went with in the end.

[profs77]

I would download macromedia dreamweaver from the macromedia site. When you type certain tags like cfoutput, they will give you a list of attributes to choose from automatically.

[Mitch]

The best resource is Ben Forta's Web Application Construction Kit. Forta has been a huge part of the CF community for a long time, and his books are a must for beginners and experts. His website is at forta.com, but you should be able to find a copy of his book at any descent bookstore.

You might also look at: coldfusioncookbook.com, it is a new resouce that is starting to take off.

Good luck.

[woodside]

You'd be surprised how many big companies use coldfusion, the company I work for (fortune 500 company) uses CF for almost all it's internal web applications. Switching some stuff over to java now, but CF will be around for a long time.

[drewbe121212]

After reading through this, while CF seems decent, I think I will stick to my PHP. I am not interested in learning this far off base language at this time :) Just my feelings though... :cool:

[ThirdChair]

ColdFusion is our number one choice for all of our clients that want to do anything dynamic on the Web. I like ColdFusion because it lends itself to creating applications quickly. I've coded applications in ASP/ASP.Net/PHP and hands down ColdFusion is easier to learn and develop with. That is if our client has a budget. If they have no budget for hosting, we go ASP/PHP.

The major, major downside to ColdFusion is the price, being not FREE. All the other platforms can be developed on and implemented as a part of the server software. However, ColdFusion needs to be purchased and then installed over IIS or Apache or whatever your Web server software is.

ColdFusion still is popular and is gaining ground with the latest release MX 7. Personally, I'm looking to see huge strides with ColdFusion in the next 2 years. I have a feeling that they are going to go toward a free license, not open source, just a free production level install. They have a dev version now, but that can't be installed on a production server.

My top resources for CF development are:
http://ray.camdenfamily.com/index.cfm
http://www.asfusion.com/blog

And my own Blog, which primarily deals with ColdFusion Flash Forms and Yahoo Maps integration.
http://thirdchair.com/client

Sorry, my "live links" are not active yet, I just joined the forum.

[ArmchairDeity]

CF saw its strongest year ever in 2005, with more units being sold than any other year to day. CF 7.0.1 is the best, most stable version of CF to date, and being able to run CF on top of many of the most popular (and powerful) J2EE servers in the industry (WebSphere, Tomcat, SunOne, etc.) has driven it to heights not previously imagined. In 2005, Macromedia had a single sale of ColdFusion software that totalled over $1M dollars... the first time in history. Advances in the product and it's J2EE integration have resulted in the adoption of CF by some of the largest and most successful corporations in the world.

CF is a programming language that's used by the CF J2EE application to generate Java bytecode directly. It is largely tag-based (though it has a scripting language), can be used procedurally or for object-oriented development, and, after 10 years of development and evolution, focuses on the high-level tasks faced by web-developers on a daily basis. However, because it's a J2EE application it is also capable of easily integrating Java objects directly and can tackle complicated, low-level, and time-consuming tasks that require large numbers of workarounds on other platforms.

The primary conflict between CF and PHP programmers is a result of, largely, ignorance and bigotry on the parg of the PHP community. As far as the CF "community at large" is concerned, roughly 75% of CFers were PHP developers at one point. Emphasis on "were." The convenience and ease of development that come from complete, stable, and well-planned high-level implementations of low-level tasks and the Java integration aspects of CF make it a very attractive option for those who want to put up robust web applications quickly.

With CF, when you need to install a module you don't have (which, due to the completness of the platform, is rarely necessary), you drop a couple jar files in your /web-inf/lib folder and restart the server, as opposed to downloading open-source modules from several providers, setting up a build script, recompiling the server, and then relaunching it.

And you can get hosting accounts from places like HostMySite for around $5-$10/month, so the "it's too expensive" argument just doesn't fly. One other point to consider: the individual end-user of CF has the same power and flexibility available to them that major, massive corporations have.

[JasonBartholme]

The best resource is Ben Forta's Web Application Construction Kit.

Within eyeshot are Forta's Web Application Construction Kit, and the Advanced book of the same name. Forta also wrote SQL in 21 hours which was essential for me after I was thrown into CF.

You may want to visit EasyCFM.com. It was and is an excellent resource for CF tutorials and help with problems. Their forum is very active and you can generally get a quick response for your question.

[kovacs]

I've been working with ColdFusion since version 1.5 back in 1995 or so - it's fantastic. Much easier to work with than PHP, and easily integrates into a Linux environment and talks to MySQL etc. I build all my sites with CF, although most turnkey sites I run are PHP because I buy them... ;)

It's NOT hard to find good CF hosting. Examples are http://www.crystaltech.com and http://www.viviotech.net - I've used both of these over the years and they're both very skilled at ColdFusion support.

What is expensive is hosting CF on your own server. I have a dedicated server running CFMX and am leasing a license for $85/month. For shared hosting you never need to do that, though.

[kovacs]

I should add that there is an alternative called BlueDragon, from http://www.newatlanta.com/ which lets you do pretty much anything that you can do with ColdFusion (and then some). The basic edition is completely free.

[Postingpays]

Cold Fusion is a powerful language based on Java platform. It is completely a tag based language with very easier tag to understand. When i started porgramming I found ASP very handy. but then when i got a chance to work on cold fusion found much more handy than asp. The main thing you have in it is it tag based structure.

Only thing which is ColdFusion server is quite expensive than ASp server.

[kovacs]

Yeah, ColdFusion is expensive if you need it on a dedicated server. But if you can manage with shared hosting, there are lots of good plans out there where you can get ColdFusion for very little. I was on shared CF plans for years before I decided to fork out for a dedicated box and a CFMX license.