What does a philosophy major do after college? Woodworking, of course! Initial small woodworking projects gave way to larger projects and I found I needed some way of automating the "cut lists" used to pre-cut all the pieces of wood for a project.

My first step was acquiring a Texas Instrument programmable calculator. I forget the exact price -- $300-400 --but it had these things called "variables"! And I could plug them into a formula I wrote to get the exact size of pieces. Amazing stuff.

From there, I went on to write Lotus 1-2-3 macros, then tackled BASIC. From there, it was learning DataCAD and learning their programming language. Finally, I slipped the woodworking tether completely and sold my company. A good friend of mine, a technologist, hired me and shipped me off to this strange place called "Palo Alto Research Center". Xerox PARC was the legendary research facility where Bill Gates and Steve Jobs first saw a windowing system and a mouse, all powered by the language, Smalltalk.

Fast-forward a few years and I found myself the head of "the Web group". One of the early questions was which language we would use. Java was the odds-on favorite, but this was version 1. It was buggy and slow. Steve Jobs was peddling Web Objects, but the cost was much too high. Then, there was this little language, "Cold Fusion", that had a lot of promise (and a fair amount of risk). I decided to risk it.

That was when ColdFusion was at 3.5. During that time, I've seen the language evolve and grow. "Cold Fusion" lost the space in its name; features have been added; the underlying platform has changed. Through all its changes, ColdFusion has never lost sight of its roots: making life easier for developers. And the culture that grew up around ColdFusion has always seemed to me one of its greatest assets. While developers in other languages might tell newbies to RTFM, ColdFusion folks have always been warm and open, ready to share and learn from each other freely.

Thanks to Jeremy, JJ, Ben -- and all those who labored to bring ColdFusion to where it is today.

Over the last couple of weeks since starting this "Learning ColdBox" series, I've been working more extensively with the framework. There's a lot in ColdBox and it took me quite a while to really feel comfortable with it. Having gotten over that initial hurdle, I'm very glad I did. Many thanks to my colleague, Ben Densmore, who has been always willing to answer my naive ColdBox questions -- even at 2.00 AM. I'm by no means an expert; I've just gotten to the point where I'm happy being a bit reckless!

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Before we get into writing the application, I want to ask about logging with LogBox. A while ago, I felt the need for something more than I could get with native logging. During development, I wanted to have the ability to log something. That something might be a simple value, an array, a struct, an object, etc.

While I didn't want logging to occur when code moved to production (for obvious reasons), I did want to leave the code in place (so that, for example, I could turn it on if some anomaly occurred or if I wished to time certain processes while running in production). And finally, I didn't want to wrap logging code in if statements. That's ugly and, with enough of them, could become expensive. What to do?

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With the (very) basics behind, I'm ready to try my hand at a CRUD application. (Hopefully, that won't prove to be prophetically named...) But before I start, I want to explain how I do things presently -- and ask expert ColdBoxers for some guidance as to what should be changed to best use ColdBox.

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In Learning ColdBox: I, we began creating an app by getting ColdBox installed and responding. Today, we're going to go a bit deeper -- adding event handlers and associated events.

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So...my first step is going to the ColdBox site to download the framework: http://www.coldbox.org/download. I created a coldbox directory directly under wwwroot. For now, I'm going with my idea of a Philosopher Battle game (see yesterday's post). (BTW, as Phil Nacelli pointed out, ColdBox comes with several sample applications already! Why not just one of these? See below...) So, let's start with creating a "Philosophy Game" app.

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Lately, I've undertaken to learn ColdBox, as I'll be using it on an upcoming project. ColdBox is a powerful, robust ColdFusion framework. Luis Majano and contributors have done a pretty terrific job, it appears to me. In fact, all FOSS developers could learn a great deal from how well documented the project is.

So I mean the project no disrespect when I say that, as a newb, what would be most welcome is a small but comprehensive sample application. Since version 3.0 was just released, (http://www.coldboxframework.com/), it seems that this would be a perfect time for such a sample app/tutorial.

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We've been examining the specifics of how to create event driven programs for the last several blog posts. But somehow, we need to integrate jQuery custom events with our server code. In this post, we'll see how we use Ajax to do just that.

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One thing that people coming to Ruby on Rails are struck by is the rich ecosystem. It's similar to jQuery with many plugins. I thought it might be helpful to translate a few plugins into CFML. This first installment deals with generating fake data -- ideal for populating a database.

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I've heard from quite a few programmers who are interested in putting their toe in the RoR waters. It is a big step -- and to make that as non-stressful as possible, I'm going to hold a free two-hour online "Intro to Ruby on Rails for ColdFusion Programmers" training on September 22 from 12.30 to 2.30 Eastern US time.

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