Mike Benner: Coldfusion 8 is to Web 2.0 as Coldfusion 4.x was to .com Bubble

Coldfusion 8 is to Web 2.0 as Coldfusion 4.x was to .com Bubble

Sep 4 by Michael Benner

That's right I said it. Web 2.0. Yup, said it again. OK, so I am sure many of you can remember back to the great days of getting data out of a database, letting a designer make it pretty and having a VC throw lots of money at the company.

While those times were great and I had a lot of fun listening to everyone's plans to rule the world, I also remember how easy it became to give it to them with Coldfusion. Prior to Coldfusion I was writing primarily ASP sites doing the heavy lifting with Visual Basic and Transaction Server and it would take time, third party plug-ins and did I mention time. Coldfusion

changed a lot of that for me.

I first found CF while visiting Allaire in San Diego for a seminar, I mean sales pitch with code demos...Seeing some of the mail functions and other items (calendars built quickly, etc) I was sold and started making the transition. I still write code in other languages and have to go to third parties at times but CF is my language of choice.

Well, it seems great times are upon us again. And while the money and glory may not be the same, some very cool things are happening on the web and I think this is what the bubble aspired to be (it was just early). RIA's are exploding all over the web and not just in Adobe based technologies (read: Flash and Flex). AJAX is really allowing sites to change the interaction aspect of design.

This is great, but JavaScript seems to be frightening to a lot of developers (it got a bad rep back in the day and seems to be having trouble shaking it) and holding them back. Enter ColdFusion 8 and its built in AJAX support. Using Spry and YUI it does some wonderful things, CFPOD, CFDIV, etc. The BIND attribute is great. I think CF8 is going to enable developers to move into the RIA arena with greater ease and will help facilitate them moving to Web 2.0 sites (damn I said it again) with less resistance.

With Coldfusion 8 the future is here and accessible. If you have not done so already, download the developer copy and give it a spin.