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Amcom Technology Case Study

Background Information

• http://www.amcomtech.net/
• Amcom MVC Analysis Document

Summarize your current project

A business rules engine to automate what is currently a manual and subjective decision making process. Utilizing a series of inputs, the rules engine determines the next possible steps.

How many developers in the team

7 Developers

What is your / your team's CFML and ColdBox experience?

We’re relatively new to it. But the ColdBox learning curve is minimal, so getting ramped up to proficient level is quick and smooth.

Do you or your team have any framework experience?

20% of the staff have prior significant framework experience.

How long have you been working with ColdBox?

3 months

Technical Information

What version of ColdBox are you using?

ColdBox 3

What CFML Engine are you using?

Adobe ColdFusion 9

Was there a technical hurdle that ColdBox was able to overcome? If so, what was it?

• ColdBox allowed us to introduce the framework into our existing legacy application without having to redo the application. We want to ColdBox-ify features as needed based on business priority, while at the same time using ColdBox on all new features.
• Because of some of the ways the legacy application works we had to do a little bit of configuration work to make it happen (CB and Application.cfc application mappings).

Is there a particular feature in ColdBox that stands out to you and/or your team?

• Debug output is excellent.
• Documentation
• SES URLs
• Advanced Caching
• Interceptors are really neat.

Did ColdBox help your application's maintainability, deployment and scalability?

Since CB takes out a lot of the guess work and helps a team stay consistent, it makes it easy for any developer to get in there and understand what’s going on.

Did you integrate other technologies, libraries, frameworks with ColdBox? If so, how was the integration process?

ColdSpring – CB is ready to go with CS.

Architecture

Where does ColdBox fit in your or your team's architecture long term? Does it have a primary role? Secondary role?

After an exhaustive analysis of ColdFusion frameworks, our company has standardized as ColdBox being the core application technology for framework and architecture.

What made you choose ColdBox? What where ColdBox's main advantages?

• We needed to maintain development velocity in order to meet business demands, so we didn’t have the luxury of slowing down and taking a huge learning curve hit.
• We develop everything off of a large (500K lines of code) flagship product that has been in development since ColdFusion 4, so many aspects of it are old school. It’ll never be a business priority to rewrite the entire application, so we needed a framework that would allow us to progressively framework-afy this product without breaking existing functionality.
• Documentation, numerous examples, and conventions based approach significantly reduce the learning curve.
• From a business perspective, you want to minimize exposure to the chances of a technology becoming obsolete, or unsupported. This risk can be higher when it comes to open source initiatives – ColdBox is the most actively maintained framework, which is a very good sign.
• Paid support is available.
• Contributors of ColdBox actively support their community.

General

What was your experience building your applications using ColdBox?

Very positive experience. Any problems that we encountered we were able to find the answer through the documentation or in the forums.

What advice would you give to someone coming into using ColdBox?

1. Start with one of the simple examples, and use that as a pattern to build your application.
2. Don’t worry about trying to use all the features all at once. With ColdBox it’s easy to continually refine your work to re-factor logic into other layers and what not.

Was the ColdBox documentation and advantage to your development?

Absolutely!

Where your business goals address and accomplished?

Absolutely!