How I Got Started in Coldfusion

In honor of How I Got Started in Coldfusion day here is my story.

My ColdFusion career began at Indiana University in 1997 in a required class for a Computer Information Systems degree. (I primarily ended up pursuing a CIS degree because JAVA counted as a foreign language requirement.) The class was Visual Programming, and Visual Basic and Power Builder were the primary technologies covered. Cold Fusion 3.0 was thrown during the last week to demonstrate an emerging “web page” language.

I remember spending many nights in the computer lab trying to develop VB applications. Dropping  elements on a grid, lining everything up, and then double-clicking each element to add it’s code. Then waiting for everything to compile. The whole process was very painful.

Then the professor demonstrated Coldfusion! A simple login page in CF Studio. All the code was on a single page and logically flowed. I could understand what everything was doing immediately by just the names of the tags. And all you had to do was copy and paste a query from Access or MSSQL into a tag and you could display records directly on the page. Brilliant! I was sold.

It took me a couple years in the workforce before I could work in ColdFusion all the time and no ASP! I write a ton of queries and still simply paste them into a cfquery (of course adding cfqueryparams). I’m proud of what the groups I’ve been a part of have accomplished in ColdFusion. And I always compare new languages with the features and development speed of CF.