Confessions of a Self Professed Five Tagger

January 26, 2011 · 4 Comments

I've had a long journey. I sustained a one woman consulting business for over 10 years (96-06) with my knowledge of ColdFusion. When I started I was innovative by bringing library skills into a corporate web competitive intelligence environment. I had a client that believed in me and sustained me, but in the end my application wasn't keeping up with the demands of the project and I was eventually phased out. It was only later that I realized I had become a dreaded five tagger.

So what, you ask, is a five tagger? It has come to be known in the ColdFusion community as a programmer that only uses five basic tags to get the job done. Those five tags are:

<cfquery>
<cfset>
<cfoutput>
<cfloop>
<cfif>

The problem is, most enterprise applications follow a complex set of business rules that govern how that application acts and behaves. More importantly those rules change and evolve with the needs of the business making maintainability more difficult the longer the application stays in use.

I resisted frameworks and object oriented thinking for 10 yrs because they only seemed to over complicate the things I was already doing. Unfortunately my projects crumpled under the burdens of performance and maintainability. What I've discovered in the use of design patterns, mainly object oriented design and MVC (model-view-controller), is a whole new world of productivity I never imagined.

I feel like I just wrote my manifesto.

Tags: ColdFusion · Object Oriented (OO)

Comments

Lola LB wrote on 01/26/11 3:02 PM

Oh, boy, that sure sounds familiar to me.

Ben Nadel wrote on 01/27/11 11:38 AM

I know what you mean. I feel like I am maxing out my ability with 5 tags. I keep meaning to play with ORM and the like; sometimes keeps stopping me. Probably fear :)

Daria wrote on 01/27/11 2:59 PM

HA! Ben, you know you really should try new things and then blog about it. ;)

I meant to write a better conclusion to this before it was published, but I guess that's what I get for blogging while drunk. :)

Ben Nadel wrote on 01/31/11 5:56 AM

I think I need to start another small, test project to get more comfy with the ideas. I should probably start coding CF9 *only* on my local machine.

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