mark mcaulay

Disclaimer. I am a designer. That’s right, I’m a wax crayon throwing, glitter gun wielding, stickyback plastic lovin, front end guy. That’s my background and what I still largely love to get my hands dirty on. I design stuff, what of it? But before you pigeon hole me, you need to understand that I am also proud to be called a generalist…you know…someone who likes to do a bit of everything.

Several years back I had to get involved with server side stuff which meant the inevitable walk down the road to buy a PHP/MySql book and get stuck in best I could. This was fine, I learned a fair bit about what is, in my experience anyway, the most abundant server side solution out there and a great solution for “getting shit done”. I found that I started to enjoy it. There was a whole new world of possibility knowing a bit about the backend and my optimism was high. What happened next was that I got exposed to a fairly large scale application built with Adobe ColdFusion (version 7 at the time). My task was to build front ends for it in all its various guises (cryptic, I know). As I worked more and more with this application, I got more and more interested in CFML and so I spent the next year of my life’s spare time doing little tutorials, building little test apps and all the other little things I had previously done with PHP. One day in June 2008, I went to Scotch on the Rocks which, for those that dont know, is a conference dealing with all things CFML and a wider bunch of related tech to boot. SOTR had a profound effect on me. Almost a month after, a job came in requiring a basic CMS, data driven Flash widgets and an HTML front end. Armed with my new CFML enthusiasm, I volunteered to do the job with Adobe ColdFusion as I’d been banging on about how great it was to the guys at work. We had a dedicated CF8 server to play with and a comfortable deadline so it seemed the perfect opportunity to put my money where my mouth was and get cracking for real with CFML.

I quickly found my feet and wrote a bespoke CMS for the project, yes, you read that correctly…”BESPOKE”, not an “I’ll just use WordPress” or EE solution that I would look to do while using PHP, I actually wrote the CMS with my own bare hands. Not bad for a designer huh? I’m not saying it’s the greatest piece of development that the world’s ever seen, or that’s its a feature rich masterpiece. It does only what it needs to do and not a thing more (which some may argue should always be the case). The client feedback was superb and to this day it continues to serve it’s purpose out there in the wild. I was able, in the time allocated to build the whole thing in PHP(as normal), to build a more tailored and lightweight solution from scratch using a language which had been a hobby to me until SOTR. Could I have built a bespoke PHP solution? probably…could I have built it in the allocated time?…nope!

I suppose I’d better get to the point. It is my experience that when starting down the road of server side tech (and yes, I know I had a little bit of PHP and general understanding) I dont think you can go far wrong using CFML to get you going. I’m not saying that CFML is for noobs, If you spend more than 10 minutes in the CFML community you’ll discover some fantastically clever developers who will make your brain bleed. What I am saying is that the barrier to entry is suitably low for a front end guy versed in html/css/js to jump right in and get stuff done. There is a lot of anti-CF sentiment spouted by people with little or no server side experience at all which I find bizarre, it’s like a developer with no design experience saying PhotoShop is shit because you have to pay for it when you could just use the gimp for free. Any designer using both will tell you what they’d rather have at their disposal. Of course, if you want a free solution, you can have that with Railo and OpenBD. I havent personally used OpenBD but I have used Railo in anger and its superb. Perhaps the biggest un-sung bonus of CFML though is the community. I like to jump around from technology to technology and try my best to get a general understanding of as much of it as I can. One thing that I note is the CFML community, in my experience, is the friendliest, most helpful and most giving of their time that I’ve discovered yet. If you’ve ever tried to learn something on your feet, you’ll know how hugely important this factor is.