Although it took me some time to fully immerse myself in the online CF community I now have about half a dozen blogs that I read daily and provide me with all the news and support I could ask for (apart from that elusive intermediate procedural-to-OOP resource)!

I had to get full immersed into PHP a few years ago when CF was not an option for a project I was working on. I was surprised at the time, like you said, how watered down it was.

CF should be the same way. I agree that one of CF’s major strengths is how easy it is to get into the language, so while we don’t want to lose that, we also don’t want to spend most of the time teaching people about the language features only to introduce CFCs as something "advanced." Introduce things "correctly" (IMO anyway) from day one.

I took a Flex course recently that drove this point home. After a very simple "Hello World" example we immediately dove into custom events because they’re at the heart of well-architected Flex applications. The same goes for CF–CFCs should be introduced very early so it doesn’t turn into a huge mindshift later down the road.

We need to do something about this in that we need to get developers to recognize that CFCs are integral part to developing code…and not just stop there. We then need to show them how CFCs fit in to good object-oriented design.

An artist never starts off creating masterpieces. The artist learns techniques, how to apply those techniques to different medium, etc. Then, after having found the techniques and medium that they favor, that’s when they hone their skills, and eventually make incredible works of art.

I feel that any programmer has to (learn / be taught) the proper techniques. The programming languages are tools that one leverages to create internet goodness. Each language has different strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes you choose the language based on your proficiency, sometimes the language is chosen for you.

I guess after all this rambling, I agree with your basic premise, there needs to be a stronger drive in the CF community towards creating tutorials, example applications, etc. that focus on "the best practices".

I’ve seen plenty of posts on creating MVC applications in most of the frameworks, and that’s all well and good. But once that "eureka" moment hit me, and I started <strong>really</strong> using CFCs as objects (instantiation, inheritance, etc.), it’s really hard to even look at some of the old code that I wrote.

http://www.iknowkungfoo.com/blog/index.cfm/Primers

Now that MAX is over, I’ll be adding more very soon.

I was at Brian’s BOF sessions and had a lot of fun. Hopefully next year we can get more time for them.

However, I think we as a community, need to be careful not to put ColdFusion into a box. We have to be very careful not to over-commit to the OOCF ways of doing things and forget that one of the biggest draws of ColdFusion is its strength as a rapid application development language. Thats one of the things that pulls a lot of newer developers to ColdFusion. We as a community have to conitinue to support that as well as do a better job of transitioning those newer developers to doing things in an OO manner.