ColdFusion has always been the language that makes the hard things easy. When you’re new to ColdFusion and you’re browsing the available tags, most people are confused to see cfform, cfinput, cfsubmit which are tags that wrap the standard HTML tags. Using these however, ColdFusion makes it easy to perform both client-side and server-side validation with the same code (producing the necessary client-side code for you).
The same goes with the new ColdFusion AJAX tags, such as cfgrid. All of the functionality can be achieved hand-coding it yourself using CFCs and the Ext JS library. But why would you?
Sure, when you look at the source, its not exactly the same as one might hand-code themselves; but if you can look past that, there is some powerful functionality that is really easy to tap into.
If you simply need a paging datagrid, for speed and ROI, it’s hard to look past the built-in capabilities of cfgrid. It’s value for your money as far as your clients are concerned, and profit for your own business. Little advertised by Adobe, but you can extend the functionality of tags like cfgrid via the well documented Ext JS API.
I’ve decided to throw together a few examples, and further explore the possibilities of using cfgrid and other ColdFusion AJAX tags rather than rolling our own all of the time using jQuery.
Filed under: ajax, coldfusion, examples
