Aseen asks:
I am a beginner in coldfusion technology. And I want to improve my skills by practising some good applications. So can anyone suggest me any website or any application to work?
I am very happy to see this question. I'm a huge believer in using real applications, or at least real problems, to learn languages. For example - typically you learn about a language by seeing extremely simple examples. Normally these examples focus on one thing, a particular function or tag. I find that I don't learn well like this. Sure, while I'm reading the doc it is fresh, but until I use it in an application, I don't really learn it. I've found that this is my main problem with Java. I've "learned" it a few times now, but just haven't had the time to get practical experience with it. That's why I'm trying to be more pro-active with Flex2 and Spry. (In fact, I've got a new Flex2 game in the works I hope to release soon.)
For example, I wrote The Death Clock way back in the early 90s as a way to learn Perl. I converted it to ColdFusion to help me learn ColdFusion. I wrote this blogware as a learning exercise.
Let me suggest this: Find an application that interests you. It need not be a giant application, or even an entire site. It can as simple as a calendar application. Build it out as complete as you can. It will be horrible. Trust me. But you will gain "real" experience and will be able to return to the application later and improve it.
One nice thing about "real" applications is that you don't have to map it out. You know what a calendar application should do. You know what a blog application should do. Not having to worry about the feature design phase means you can move more quicker into the actual coding phase.
Archived Comments
There's this guy that posts CF contests and challenges of a variety of levels on his blog - I think his name is Ray Camden ;)
Even if you don't enter its always worth having a look at them and thinking about how you would solve the problem. It doesn't matter if it takes you more than the suggested 5 minutes to solve them.
Any chance of a "challenge" category on your blog Ray, so that they are a bit easier to find? ;)
Heh, I was almost considering giving up the Friday Puzzlers. The last few haven't gotten a lot of feedback. :)
I have yet to "break up" my CF category, but I probably should at some point.
I couldn't agree with you more Ray. My first REAL forway into CF was a desire to build an e-commerce site to sell toys and action figures online. While that application did work, it sucked. But I learned volumes about ColdFusion in a very short time.
Today, my learning continues this way. Each project I strive to incorporate something new I have learned or want to learn. That's the col thing about this industry, if you like to learn you never have to stop learning!
If you can find a way to tie it to something you like to do in your daily life, even better. It'll keep you more motivated to at least get going somewhere. For instance, I love to knit, and I have a large inventory of yarns, needles, patterns. There's no application on the Macintosh platform. So, I had to roll my own application, with help of a database schema that a knitting blogger who is a dba put together (this was also good in helping me learn MySQL since I had to convert it from MSSQL to MySQL). I use this app to learn new CF stuff. One of those days I'll turn it to a Flex app when I get it figured out. Or some other new technology that Adobe dreams up . . .
I've got a long list of functionalities that I want to add - for instance, generating basic sweater patterns (it's really more of an algorithm, for instance, cuff is usually 10 to 15% of the total sleeve stitches) using a person's measurements that I put into this application.
Having introduced a couple of dozen would-be programmers to ColdFusion I have come up with a very good example application to get someone going with CF. I use a contact manager application, everyone knows what one of these is supposed to do and if they decide to take it far enough it is something they could use for themselves. Using this has served myself and the programmers I have taught very well.