[Craig328]

I wanted to start a thread listing useful Coldfusion-related resources. We get a fair number of beginner CF developers visiting and I thought some of the more experienced CF devs here could share information and/or links to resources they find most useful. If you know of a resource that's not mentioned here, please add it so CF pros and n00bs alike can benefit.


Language Resources

Adobe ColdFusion LiveDocs - If you're a newb to CF development and think you need to memorize each and every CF tag...forget it. Even the most experienced developers need to consult a language resource from time to time (me...about 2-3 times per day). This resource IS ColdFusion. Introduction to CFML, how to use it, what it can do, tag listing, function listing and more. The link is for CF9 but Adobe maintains the same sort of resource for CF8, MX7 and MX6.1. Even if you use a different CF platform, many of the tags are the same and are defined and explained well here. Having this on your browser's bookmarks list is a must.

BlueDragon CF Compatibility Guide - If you use NewAtlanta's BlueDragon CFML platform, this guide is also a must have. Introduces and explains the CF tags unique to BlueDragon as well as the universal tags that have different attributes/behaviors in BlueDragon.

Railo CFML Wiki - If you use the Open Source CFML engine, Railo...this is the place for you. Links to everything you need to know about how to get Railo, how to install and configure Railo and any language differences can be found here.

OpenBD Manual - If you use the Open Source CFML engine, OpenBD (Open BlueDragon) then this is an unbeatable resource as well. Everything you ever wanted to know about OpenBD but were afraid to ask can be found here.

CFScript Tutorial - While all the CFML engines feature the CFSCRIPT tag, and many of us know that CFSCRIPT can often run faster and with less overhead than identical CF tag solutions, the documentation for CFSCRIPT has always been paltry and hard to find. Enter the House of Fusion CFSCRIPT Tutorial. Probably the single best CFSCRIPT reference yet.

The Query of Queries User Guide - One of the better but lesser appreciated features of CFML is Query of Queries. Many times QofQ can solve your most stubborn data manipulation problems...IF you know how to use it. The documentation for how to properly use Query of Queries is difficult to find and a listing of supported SQL reserved words, aggregate functions, expressions and such is a very handy to have resource. They're all found here.


Code Resources

CFLib.org - An astute forum post I read recently completely defines CFLib: "The inexperienced programmer asks 'How can I do this?'; the experienced programmer asks 'Where has this been done before?'". Pro or newb, CFLib is the repository of ColdFusion functions that can turn your day from awful back to great in mere moments. Faced with a daunting formatting task, SQL string manipulation, JSON translation or other such arcane CF tortures? It's likely that someone else has already been there/done that and was kind enough to polish and post their solution so you don't have to suffer.

Code Snippets - Like CFLib above, if you find you can't figure out how to solve a particular problem Google can be your best friend. However, this site compiles some handy CF code snippets to make your day a little easier.


CF Pros and other CF Sites

Ben Forta's Blog - Ben Forta has been ColdFusion's evangelist since the earliest days. He's likely forgotten more about ColdFusion than I know and has compiled a fair amount of his knowledge on his blog. I linked to his CF resources page as, for whatever reason, it seems to have more obvious navigation to the help you're likely looking for.

House Of Fusion - House Of Fusion has also been around for quite awhile. Has a lively and well attended forum, a good supply of CF info and has one of the most robust CF employment lists on the web.

Ben Nadel's Blog - Ben Nadel is another CF pro who maintains a popular CF-centric blog. Ben has a talent for explaining complex concepts (and tends to provide supporting code examples) in an easy to understand way and the folks who post replies to his blog entries provide nearly as much insight. He lacks a blog search but a listing of all his blog entries can be found here and Ctrl-F on that page can be your friend.

Ray Camden's Blog - Ray Camden is yet another CF guru who posts a blog called Coldfusion Jedi. It too is stocked full of observations, problems, solutions, explanations and insightful comments on how to bend CF to your will when it won't.


CFML Server Software

Adobe Free Developer Edition of ColdFusion - The free developer version of ColdFusion (currently version 9). This lets you install the full featured version of Coldfusion server on your local development machine and will serve pages just to one IP address. Ideal for local development and from there you can deploy your code to a CF production server, client site, etc. You have to register (if new) or log in (if not) but Adobe doesn't seem to abuse the email spam too much.

BlueDragon Server - From their site: "All versions of BlueDragon are free for unlimited development and testing...[all] downloads are fully-functional production quality versions of BlueDragon". Like Adobe's CF9 above, NewAtlanta offers all their BlueDragon products (all .NET and Java based versions) as free developer downloads however "[an] evaluation license key can be obtained to remove the local IP processing restriction for 30 days, allowing browser requests from any machine to be processed". This means you can deploy a fully functional version of BlueDragon's CFML server onto the web for 30 days to see if it's right for your site.

OpenBD Download - Download the free Open Source OpenBD CFML server platform here. They have installers for J2EE, Windows, Linux, and Jetty and only require that you have Java 1.5 installed (as of this post).

Railo Download - Free download of the Open Source Railo CFML server product. Of note, they offer a Mac OSX version in addition to Windows and Unix/Linux servers.


Free CF Developer Software

Eclipse IDE - The free IDE that Adobe's new ColdFusion Builder is based on. Easy to install and portable (meaning if you do it right, you could install this on a thumb drive to take with you wherever you go if you wanted), this IDE is known for its flexibility, cross-tech appeal (used by Java, PHP, Java EE, C/C++ devs) and multitude of plugins so you can customize your development environment however you like.

CFEclipse Plugin - If you choose to use Eclipse then you'll almost certainly want this ColdFusion Eclipse plugin that makes CF development easy with it's integrated CF libraries, support for multiple code versioning products, and other CF related tasks.


In addition to all this, there are all kinds of SQL help sites, software and such as well as other technologies commonly used by CF devs like HTML help sites, CSS how-to tutorials, Ajax sites, JQuery download and tutorial sites, CF frameworks (Fusebox, Mach II, Model Glue, etc), Javascript snippets and help sites...and so on.

Hope this helps and shares the knowledge for CF devs both new and old. If you want to add to this list please post your info and link(s) to it (if available).

This post has been edited by Craig328: 21 May 2012 - 02:03 PM
Reason for edit:: Updated dead link

[macosxnerd101]

Topic pinned, and +1 for assembling this list.

[cyb1n]

This seems like it will be very helpful indeed.

[Craig328]

Stumbled across a nice CFSCRIPT cheat sheet that Pete Freitag put together a couple of years ago. Pete's yet another CF pro and his cheat sheet can be found here.

As a complete aside and for beginning CF devs I wanted to mention the necessity to scope your variables when you code. In Coldfusion, all variables belong to a scope. Scoping a variable means that when you set a variable you tell Coldfusion which scope it belongs to. A good guide to scoping variables can be found here. If you don't scope your variables your code won't necessarily break or error but it could do some odd things if you have two variables in different scopes with the same variable name. As of CFMX 7, Coldfusion will evaluate unscoped variables in the following progression:

• Function local (UDFs and CFCs only)
  
• Arguments
  
• Variables (local scope)
  
• CGI
  
• Cffile
  
• URL
  
• Form
  
• Cookie
  
• Client

Anyway, it's a good habit to get into. Eliminates a source of possible confusion, makes your code easier to read, way easier to debug and means the CF server doesn't need to spend additional processing time scrolling through the evaluation order in order to use your variable.

This post has been edited by Craig328: 03 August 2010 - 09:10 AM

[xheartonfire43x]

Here are a couple other great links that should be included

Mura Tools Eclipse Plugin - A great tool for developers who use mura a lot
RIAForge - A collection of Open Source projects
GitHub - Free Git source control for Open Source projects
Remote Synthesis ColdFusion Open Source Project List
ColdFusion Meetup - The largest online ColdFusion User group doing on average 4 meetings a week.

This post has been edited by Craig328: 07 September 2011 - 08:19 AM

[Craig328]

I like the Remote Synthesis one. THAT's handy.

As an aside, I submitted a new entry to Remote Synthesis for Fusioncharts (http://www.fusioncharts.com/). It's a Flash based charting solution (much more extensive and customizable than native CFCHART) and I've used it for years on other projects. Have the CF generate the XML data for the chart, embed the chart .swf file and pass it the XML and presto, you have a chart. Easy stuff and LOTS of options.

Good finds those.

This post has been edited by Craig328: 18 August 2010 - 04:17 AM