I’ve been at my current project for more than 2 years and recall that at the beginning, I used CFLayout with its siblings CFWindow and CFLayoutarea etc. These are implementations of ColdFusion’s Ajax and I have to say I was very impressed. Using them makes piecemeal of difficult tasks like paneling where you would have one panel make things happen in another. For instance you can have a form in one panel and the results of submitting it can be seen in another panel, all without the page refreshing. The coding required is so simple its just unbelievable. No more dealing with jQuery and its complicated syntax. Of course, it does help to know what’s going on behind the scenes and what ColdFusion is doing but its not necessary. I was given a task, and I’m still amazed at how quickly and easily it was to start. In just a few hours we had the whole thing working and it just came down to making it look pretty. All the functionality was implemented using already established ColdFusion practices and paneling everything. Continue Reading

In the web development world, you know You’ve met a geek when they talk of the glories of Open Source software. You’ll hear of how much better Linux is than Windows, how much you don’t have to spend on any of the technologies that are open source and how much “easier” they are to use. Of course, no one speaks to the time factor involved. Time as a cost is always something to be looked at and here is where much of the hidden cost of OpenSource software comes into play.

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