01 Where to start?

After careful research, my company decided finally to start using ColdBox 3 as a framework for our development. I say finally because we were still developing in FuseBox 5 and support for that, as well as the community has been on a very low profile for the last couple of years.

So one of the reasons that made us go for ColdBox is certainly the fact that it is still very much alive and version 3.8 has been released just a few weeks ago. On top of that, ColdBox has a very lively community and the team puts great effort in documenting the framework.

Seamless integration with Unit Testing (MXUnit, MockBox and Selenium) is the second reason. As our company is growing rapidly and the demands of customers to re-factor become more and more a daily task, we needed a solid testing base, both for testing the Units and the user interfaces (Selenium).

Those are the two major reasons why we chose for ColdBox 3 and added to those are a whole range of other reasons which I will elaborate on during the course of my blogs.

What is this blog about?

I have been tasked to prepare for using ColdBox 3. Learning the framework so that I can teach my colleagues what I know before diving into paid courses to refine our knowledge.
One of my major concerns is the overdose of documentation available, this is both a blessing and a curse: ColdBox Wiki has so much to read through... And because the new version is extremely new, the documentation is fragmented, a mix of the old and the new versions of the framework.

This is not me pointing fingers... It is very understandable for the documentation to be behind, after all it is a hell of a lot of work to get everything ready in time. But it does make the already challenging learning curve of learning a new framework even more difficult.

Yesterday I read a blog of Dan Vega that clearly shows in the comments that a lot of dedicated ColdFusion programmers feel the same way about it. But a learning curve should not be a reason to ignore a framework. Personally when I decided to pursue a career in Software Development I already resigned to the FACT that I would need to study my entire life. That is actually what makes this job so great! Yes, we have our boring routines, but at the end of the day you need to keep thinking "innovation"; it will enhance your personal experience AND the quality of your software. I need to be able to be proud of my accomplishments, it's what keeps me going.

But anyway, enough of me boring you to death... My reason for starting this blog is simple:
Because I am completely new to the framework, I will try to log my progress. This is both in favor of my colleagues as it is for the community. Hopefully this will result in a nice top down tutorial that can be used as a red wire through the studies of any newbie like myself.

Secretly I hope that the content of the blog may one day find its way to the ColdBox Wiki for everybody to find.

I hope my effort can be of help to somebody.

Now off to installing ColdBox