Not sure why I forgot to blog this, but a few weeks back Ray Camden told everyone that he wasn't going to tell you to stop using ColdFusion UI tags anymore. Instead, he and Adam Cameron started the ColdFusion UI the Right Way project. This project is a collection of articles and demo assets to show people that you can use other methods for displaying these dynamic client-side "widgets" in your applications, without using the CFUI tags.
Why? Well, it was a nice concept, but honestly (and in my continuing opinion) ColdFusion doesn't need to do UI. Yes, cfoutput, and looping over queries is fine, but tags like <cfform>, <cfpod>, and <cfwindow> are the devil's work. There have been long running issues with letting ColdFusion write your HTML, CSS and JavaScript for you, the chief among them being that they're bloated, buggy, limited, and (ultimately) unnecessary. You have a much finer degree of control over your application, and how it functions, when you write it yourself.
The CFUI tags were provided to allow the lowest common denominator (i.e. someone who can't really write code) to crank out something that works. They are not intended for skilled developers who write web sites and applications for a living.
And so, Rey kicked off the project with an article on replacing <cftootip> with the jQueryUI tooltip plugin, and I wrote the next article on replacing <cfwindow> with Bootstrap's modal plugin. I just checked the repository, and now there are also articles for <cfajaxproxy> and <cfdiv>.
The idea of the project is to show you a) that it's possible to do these things without the CFUI tags, and b) show you examples using a variety of libraries, to reiterate that you aren't limited to a single option.
↧
