Coldfusion & UI5
Many of you will know that I’ve been interested and using Coldfusion for a number of years now. Although it does come with, what can be sometimes, a hefty license fee you can also get shared hosting plans that include it for around £50 / year or less. Buying a Coldfusion license directly from Adobe is an expensive option whereas if you grab it through a shared hosting plan you’ll usually get all the updates included for your yearly fee – in this case renting is usually preferable to buying.
Coldfusion is a great language for rapid application development – one of the main issues over the years has been that whilst it makes the backend a lot easier to manage and can do great things with less effort, including implementing some amazing features, with half as much as code as other languages, we’ve always had a bit of a frontend dilemma with Coldfusion.
The Problem
Coldfusion isn’t designed to be pretty, it’s designed to be functional. So considerable effort has to made and knowledge gained in HTML, CSS, Javascript and any other front end languages or frameworks that you wish to include on your site / app to make it pretty.
Frontend knowledge, just like backend knowledge, will always be a pre-requisite to producing an awesome website – but now, we can make that learning curve a little less steep and get on the road quicker.
The Solution
SAP, a German multinational that makes enterprise software, has released a new framework called OpenUI5. It’s pretty easy to get started, no special software required and I’ve started to have a play around with it.
The good news for Coldfusion fans across the globe is that you can integrate OpenUI5 with your existing and new Coldfusion projects without too much effort.
As far as your Coldfusion installation and config goes there’s nothing that you have to touch with it. Follow the tutorials and integrate any UI5 code that you do with your Coldfusion application – in exactly the same way that you embed your existing HTML in to Coldfusion now.
Give it a go, have a play around and feel free to come back and comment and report on any findings and observations you have. And of course, if you have any test Coldfusion UI5 apps that you wish to share, please come back and leave us the details – I for one would definitely be very interested in seeing them.
If there’s enough interest I’ll consider making a developer series for Coldfusion UI5, adapting tutorials to the specifics of Coldfusion.
Check it out – you’ll be glad you did!
PS – check out some of the demo apps!
