Coldfusion fridge magnets
This is an example of a New Year’s card application (some 2 years old) but still something I would like to include in my portfolio. Not just because it was a fun project (the message you can send to your friend is made by typing and shuffling letters on the fridge) but also because this is one of the few occassions I had the opportunity to work with Coldfusion.
All the backend handling, the sending of the mails, the connection to the database via CF DSN, etc… is done via Coldfusion 7. In fact the programming went amazingly smooth compared to my first encounters with other server technologies.
Coldfusion has always caught my interest, not in the least because of it’s close ties to other Adobe/Macromedia products like Flash and Dreamweaver (and now Flex and Air). Personally one of the features I particularly liked and didn’t find anywhere else is the support for Macromedia FlashPaper. Now Adobe is in control it seems this feature is being abandoned but maybe their extended support for PDF manipulation will make up for that.
I’ve already used some ColdFusion ideas in PHP as well: for the Dogs on the block website I used a PHP port of the popular ColdFusion Fusebox framework.
It seems like the Belgian (or even world) market for Coldfusion is still small – in fact this is noticeable in my own projects: almost all server programming I’m asked to do is PHP. According to the TIOBE programming language ranking list ColdFusion ranks 21 (at the time of writing) with Java, C, Visual Basic, PHP and C++ as top 5 programming languages.
Still, with Adobe launching ColdFusion 8 and expressing continued support for this technology there’s a good chance it will reach the top 20 soon…
Tags: ColdFusion, Flash
