I have used ColdFusion since version 2.5 in 1998. I started off using ColdFusion's built-in UI and quickly became disappointed. It was fine for beginners, but problematic when using it for enterprise web applications.

The ColdFusion UI was brittle, and you could not expand its functionality without purchasing a new version of ColdFusion to update it—if you could at all. The consensus among the developer community was to use something other than ColdFusion's built-in UI. I personally settled on using Telerik's Kendo library with jQuery. I found this UI to be robust and beautiful.

One problem with the current front-end design is that beautifying the page requires very long and complex style sheets, which are often almost as complex as the server-side code. I wanted to use a powerful library that looked good but did not require a lot of fuss. Kendo offers me dozens of predefined themes that I can use for generic enterprise-class web applications and allows the front end to look really good with minimal fuss.

Kendo also offers rich HTML5 web widgets, such as a beautiful grid that supports editing data sets with millions of rows. It also forces the developer to use modern HTML5 code. Kendo is not without issues, though. As we will see, it is complex, and getting it to work can sometimes be tedious. I plan to annotate some of the challenges using Kendo, but it is one of the most powerful and elegant UI libraries around.

Another major issue with Kendo is that it is entirely absent among ColdFusion developers. I can't find any body of information to go to when things go astray. Telerik does not offer any ColdFusion wrappers; it only markets and supports its product for .Net, PHP, and JSP. I hope this blog can be a resource for ColdFusion developers to use Kendo, even if exploratively.

I have admired the original author of the code base that powers this blog, and use his own blog examples of ColdFusion and code for my own professional use. Raymond Camden is a legend in the ColdFusion community. His posts on the internet have literally saved my professional bacon many times. I am happy to try to re-engineer one of his older applications to fulfill this purpose. I will make decisions with his original open-source code and hope to thoroughly rewrite it. Ironically, I will likely use his new blogging layout at https://www.raymondcamden.com/ as an example of how to best re-design his older original code.