ColdFusion Programming Methodologies?

lars-o-matic asks: "I work at a small (dozen people) company doing quite well building small-to-medium sized sites on the ColdFusion platform and the Fusebox architecture (which also has PHP and JSP versions). With our growth, increasing demand for Flash apps, new features of CFMX, and wanting to take on larger projects, we are researching methodologies. We like Fusebox3 for CF but worry it does not leverage the new object-like CF Components, web services, Flash remoting etc. and wonder if some kind of model-view-controller approach would help separate presentation from business logic. And there's structured documentation, re-usability, maintenance and yes, performance to consider. We're happy with the platform, which suits our project scale. We're not (yet) building a Google or an Amazon.com. It's methodology we need. How have the Slashdot CF users out there scaled from 2 to several coders and from little sites to larger ones?"

FuseBox? Blech.

[il_diablo]

personally, i can't stand fusebox. it's an artificial construct attempting to impose order on what is, essentially, a scripting language. a powerful one (i've been building fairly large scale applications in it for ~5 years), but a scripting language nonetheless. it's just not MEANT to have that kind of structure/organization.

or at least, that's what it was LTE CF5. (as a disclaimer, i have NOT worked with MX.)

with the advent of CFMX, it may get better, but most likely it won't be more than a set of rules for including files to simulated separating business logic from presentation, and "virtual code reuse".

as a corollary, i end up developing a set of my own "code management" rules. develop them inhouse, publish the document, and give a copy to your developers when they're new hires. you can customize it to the way your own shop works, and not be constrained by the artificial rules of another development shop. and hey, you can publish that document and call it "FooBox" (or whatever) and pick up some cash.

Market?

[budalite]

Well, judging from the # of posts here, either this ain't the place for CF posts or the market isn't too hot. Shame, too. CF4 did exactly just about everything that a developer of small to medium web-apps. needed or wanted to do. CF4 worked very well with Apache. As the market for small to medium web apps went towards the gutter, so did CF, I guess. Turns out the web wasn't as popular among the basic small- to medium-sized businesses in the business world was (and amazingly still is) thought.

CFMX, as far as I can tell, is the Allaire boys (after selling out to Macromedia) and CFMX trying to be the all-purpose IDE for all dev. environments, instead of just doing its own thing, which got it where it was. Those that try to please everybody generally just please no one. Oh, well. It was really fun while it lasted.

(whatever)