Perspective from fellow Wicketers on ColdFusion job oppty.
Hey guys, I know this is an unusual question for this list, but I was hoping that I could get some viewpoints and info about something. I recently interviewed for a job opportunity at a company that runs their core app, comprised of both web interface and web services, in a cool niche that I would like to work in. Also the company seems very cool over all. It's a nice size, a small development team, and the guys I met seemed really good. The big problem is that I'd be working mostly in ColdFusion. When they told me that in the initial, pre-interview email, I thought jeez is anybody using that still. I had never had any hands-on experience with it, so I spent the weekend with a decent book working through some exercises on my laptop. What I found was that my initial impression was, this language sucks, it is a pain to use. I admit this is only after spending about 3 days with CF and I really didn't go into it with my mind wide open. So, my question would be, if anyone here has experience with CF, is it really as bad as it seems? As someone with a passionate, nearly religious fondness of Wicket, will I hate every minute of CF as much as I fear I might? Is there any chance that after trying to accept some of the things I already don't like that I will find that I can still enjoy programming a cool product even if the underlying system sucks? Thanks for any info/thoughts! - To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@wicket.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@wicket.apache.org
Re: Perspective from fellow Wicketers on ColdFusion job oppty.
Funny to hear that. In my professional (paid) web development career, I went from Perl to ColdFusion to Tapestry to Wicket. Of course, I've stuck with Wicket. But, I'm also now doing a little PHP (with Symfony framework - more on that later). I spent about five years working for a subsidiary of eBay and most of that time worked on a ColdFusion application. We converted it to Tapestry. I could probably safely say that it's about like any scripting language. It has pros and cons. But if you really love Wicket, you're likely not to like CF. And, it seems like in that sort of language, you are much more likely to walk into a rat's nest of nasty code. Some questions to ask: Do they use any of the major CF frameworks? Mach II? Do they use a modern version of CF and use MVC / object oriented code? Or do they have CFM pages that have queries and markup right in the same file? Or do they think that includes or custom tags are the right way of separating logic and markup? If you find that they are using a modern version, using an MVC framework like Mach II, etc, then it probably won't be too bad. In these modern versions, you can actually tie in java code pretty easily. But if you really love Wicket, my guess is that you won't truly enjoy CF development. But, hey, there are many things that make a job decision. I never thought I would enjoy any PHP development, but this year took a gig doing some PHP development using Symfony - and actually enjoying it - because it gives a clean separation, is oo-based, has a built-in ORM, etc. Surprised even me. Happy (job) hunting! -- Jeremy Thomerson http://www.wickettraining.com On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 10:33 PM, Jamie Swain jpsw...@gmail.com wrote: Hey guys, I know this is an unusual question for this list, but I was hoping that I could get some viewpoints and info about something. I recently interviewed for a job opportunity at a company that runs their core app, comprised of both web interface and web services, in a cool niche that I would like to work in. Also the company seems very cool over all. It's a nice size, a small development team, and the guys I met seemed really good. The big problem is that I'd be working mostly in ColdFusion. When they told me that in the initial, pre-interview email, I thought jeez is anybody using that still. I had never had any hands-on experience with it, so I spent the weekend with a decent book working through some exercises on my laptop. What I found was that my initial impression was, this language sucks, it is a pain to use. I admit this is only after spending about 3 days with CF and I really didn't go into it with my mind wide open. So, my question would be, if anyone here has experience with CF, is it really as bad as it seems? As someone with a passionate, nearly religious fondness of Wicket, will I hate every minute of CF as much as I fear I might? Is there any chance that after trying to accept some of the things I already don't like that I will find that I can still enjoy programming a cool product even if the underlying system sucks? Thanks for any info/thoughts! - To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@wicket.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@wicket.apache.org
Re: Perspective from fellow Wicketers on ColdFusion job oppty.
It only gets worse the longer you work with ColdFusion. Where I work were finally working towards abandoning it completely. Some paint points: * No null value, you get a bunch of methods to check various types of objects to see if they are undefined * You can only specify return types of the core objects provided by ColdFusion * No method overloading * Calling a method or function is usually about half a dozen lines of code. * Same with actually creating an object/component * cfthis cfthat gets really old and since the language doesn't have a schema definition for its tags (would be impossible because its not valid xml to begin with) you don't get decent IDE support. * No build or deployment tools (unless copying files ftp counts). You have to create your own. On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Jamie Swain jpsw...@gmail.com wrote: Hey guys, I know this is an unusual question for this list, but I was hoping that I could get some viewpoints and info about something. I recently interviewed for a job opportunity at a company that runs their core app, comprised of both web interface and web services, in a cool niche that I would like to work in. Also the company seems very cool over all. It's a nice size, a small development team, and the guys I met seemed really good. The big problem is that I'd be working mostly in ColdFusion. When they told me that in the initial, pre-interview email, I thought jeez is anybody using that still. I had never had any hands-on experience with it, so I spent the weekend with a decent book working through some exercises on my laptop. What I found was that my initial impression was, this language sucks, it is a pain to use. I admit this is only after spending about 3 days with CF and I really didn't go into it with my mind wide open. So, my question would be, if anyone here has experience with CF, is it really as bad as it seems? As someone with a passionate, nearly religious fondness of Wicket, will I hate every minute of CF as much as I fear I might? Is there any chance that after trying to accept some of the things I already don't like that I will find that I can still enjoy programming a cool product even if the underlying system sucks? Thanks for any info/thoughts! - To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@wicket.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@wicket.apache.org
RE: Perspective from fellow Wicketers on ColdFusion job oppty.
I have used ColdFusion in the past for 2 different clients both using CFM pages with the markup and queries in the pages. Luckily at the end of the projects I knew I was done with them and moving on to something else. The 1st project I created from scratch so it was manageable at the start but by the end with multiple developers was a mess. It wasn't difficult to learn but all the cf tags are a pain and as someone else said the IDEs didn’t like them at the time except for Homesite. The 2nd project was inherited code and it was a mess. The 2nd time at least Eclipse had a CFM plugin that helps editing the files. Basically the same pain points raised by Ben. I would say if you are a wicket/java junkie then you will not like CF unless they are using one of the modern frameworks and even then it may not be enjoyable but tolerable if landing a job is the main concern. Good Luck. On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Jamie Swain jpsw...@gmail.com wrote: Hey guys, I know this is an unusual question for this list, but I was hoping that I could get some viewpoints and info about something. I recently interviewed for a job opportunity at a company that runs their core app, comprised of both web interface and web services, in a cool niche that I would like to work in. Also the company seems very cool over all. It's a nice size, a small development team, and the guys I met seemed really good. The big problem is that I'd be working mostly in ColdFusion. When they told me that in the initial, pre-interview email, I thought jeez is anybody using that still. I had never had any hands-on experience with it, so I spent the weekend with a decent book working through some exercises on my laptop. What I found was that my initial impression was, this language sucks, it is a pain to use. I admit this is only after spending about 3 days with CF and I really didn't go into it with my mind wide open. So, my question would be, if anyone here has experience with CF, is it really as bad as it seems? As someone with a passionate, nearly religious fondness of Wicket, will I hate every minute of CF as much as I fear I might? Is there any chance that after trying to accept some of the things I already don't like that I will find that I can still enjoy programming a cool product even if the underlying system sucks? Thanks for any info/thoughts! - To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@wicket.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@wicket.apache.org
