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Label A Case Study

Background Information

Summarize your current project

Most of our projects are for companies internally (Portal/Intranet applications). We do have some publicly accessible applications, but most of the functionality is for members only.

How many developers in the team

3 senior, 4 junior developers.

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

We have experience with CFML since 2005, ColdBox since june 2008. 3 of us have the advanced ACE

Do you or your team have any framework experience?

We have a lot of experience with Coldspring and Transfer, but they’re different frameworks. Before we discovered Coldbox, we didn’t really use a comparable framework.

How long have you been working with ColdBox?

Since may 2008.

Technical Information

What version of ColdBox are you using?

We’re currently running version 2.6.4.

What CFML Engine are you using?

Railo 3.1 and Adobe ColdFusion 8

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

We use Coldbox mainly for the increase in productivity, technically we could accomplish about the same thing without a framework, but in a less elegant and far more complicated way.

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

Interceptors like SES, autowire and security. At first we didn’t really use them, but now we can’t build our applications without them.

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

The MVC structure made our applications very maintainable. The environment settings helped us a lot with deploying apps on different servers (development, testing, production). Scalability hasn’t been a problem so far because the caching mechanism works very well.

What ColdBox tools are invaluable to your development?

Plugins and interceptors. Easy integration with other frameworks like Transfer and Coldspring/Lightwire through the ioc plugin and autowire interceptor. The SES interceptor makes it completely unnecessary to write difficult rules for rewriting.

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

We’ve integrated Transfer, Coldspring and Lightwire with ColdBox. Thanks to the excellent documentation, the integration process was very easy.

Architecture

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

Coldbox is the core framework of our applications, so it definitely has a primary role on the long term. We create custom plugins and interceptors, and teach our junior programmers how to work with the MCV pattern.

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

When I stared with Coldbox, it all seemed so easy and logical. I went trough the documentation and getting started tutorials, and soon realized that this was the way I wanted to develop our Coldfusion applications. What drew us to Coldbox at first was the convention over configuration part. We really dreaded having to write all those xml files.

General

What was your experience building your applications using ColdBox?

I really loved Coldfusion until I discovered OO. Coldfusion is not an Object Oriented language. Building an OO application in Coldfusion without a framework just sucks, it took away the fun in programming for me. When I built my first app with Coldbox, it was a whole new experience, and the OO part finally seemed to make sense.

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

Read the getting started guides. Download & print the cheatsheet, it’s invaluable. How can you remember everything in ColdBox? Generate a new application in the dashboard and then just start building the application. Learn along the way. It’s not fun to have to read a lot of obscure docs and getting errors you don’t understand. ColdBox is really easy to start with and you don’t have to use all the applications features from the first day.

Was the ColdBox documentation and advantage to your development?

It was, and still is of great value to me. I still look at the documentation today. When i forget things, or to make sure I didn’t miss anything. There could be a hidden feature.

Where your business goals address and accomplished?

Yes. In 2008 we started with a new company (Label A), and wanted to do things right. We were looking for a way to build applications in a fast and structured way, without having to worry about scalability.