I have now been in web development for seven years. I got into it while in college. I built my first web page with notepad and made a simple profile page that today anybody could do. I was proud of my work. My first real web application consisted of constructing a form that stringed a few hidden parameters across multiple pages so that users could order off of a catering menu. Upon it's creation I thought it was the coolest thing. I still have the code in one of my old hard drives. The language I wrote that application in was one I had not heard of before receiving the opportunity.

At the time, I was on my summer break working an internship that was nothing more than a blessing from God. Back in school, I was struggling to matriculate into Computer Science learning Java and C++. This internship, however, provided me a chance to learn something totally different. Little did I know, it would lay the foundation on what I consider to be a great career. I was hired to work in the IT department, installing computers, punching telephone lines, providing technical support. The company changed its name so a rebranding effort gave me the opportunity to explore something no one else in my department had any expertise in. I became involved in revamping all of our intranet sites.

Armed only with a reference book provided to me and my own creativity I began to explore a language new to me, Coldfusion. At the time I had heard of PHP but wasn't too familiar with web development or the languages centered around it. Outside of my personal web page I had not done any web development before. In the span of two months, I was able to create not only the catering application, but new templates for all of the company's intranet pages on my own. Coldfusion really made it easy to make websites.

I held the internship for two summers, building pages not only for my work location but I was later sent to the corporate headquarters to build a web application there as well. At the time, I still wasn't thinking about making a career out of what I had learned. I figured I would just use the time at the company as a means to springboard into whatever I could get once out of school. I graduated from college two years later but couldn't find a job. I put my resume into every search service I could find, until finally I got a bite. What made my resume seem interesting at the time? My work with Coldfusion. It was here at my current job that I was able to nurture my understanding of CF and become not just a spaghetti coder but a software architect. My first attempt at working with CF I had no clue what I was doing, and no one to guide my actions. When I first started my current job though, I was surrounded by some pretty talented developers who had great interest in the pragmatic practice of software development. It was through this language more so than any other for me that I was finally able to connect the dots I had been missing while in school.

It puzzles me sometimes why ColdFusion appears to be disrespected, as much as it seems to me it is, outside of the CF community. I also sometimes look back and wonder why I had not heard of it until I stumbled into it. For me, the company I interned for at the time decided it was a great enterprise solution to solve their current problems. The same holds true for the government agency I contract with now. For a time one of the bigger drawbacks for CF had been the cost of entry into the language. Unlike one of its primary competitors it was not open source or a low cost solution to build web applications with. Today, there are two different open source engines that can render the CFML language as an alternative to Adobe's Coldfusion engine. Slowly more web hosting providers are adding Coldfusion as an option helping to make CF more than just an enterprise level solution.

Even the opensource software available on the platform is beginning to grow. Mura CMS which I gave a presentation on last month is a shining example. I think that as we the coldfusion community begin to help spread the word about the software language and how it can solve some of the problems we have encountered knowledge about the language will help to spread. For me, I don't think I would have achieved what I did at my internship as swiftly as I did with Java alone, .NET or PHP. That is one of the beauties about CFML. In the next couple of posts I will expand a little more on what makes Coldfusion a great web development language.