Confessions of a Self Professed Five Tagger
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.
