ColdFusion Development
ColdFusion development, done with three decades behind it
ColdFusion gets called legacy by people who've never built serious software with it. In experienced hands, Adobe ColdFusion 2023 is one of the fastest ways to ship secure, data-driven business applications. We've been doing it our whole careers.
A platform that rewards depth
ColdFusion has a reputation problem, and it's not entirely unfair: plenty of ColdFusion code out there is bad. Inline SQL, unvalidated input, five-year-old tags doing structural work, and a database that's grown the way the business did — organically. None of that is a criticism of the platform. It's a description of what happens when a capable tool lands in under-equipped hands.
Here's what the platform actually is: an integrated application environment. Database connectivity, an object model (CFCs), an ORM, caching, scheduled tasks, mail, web services, and a tag language that stays readable — all in one runtime. For data-driven business software, that integration density is a genuine engineering advantage. You spend your time on your business logic instead of gluing a dozen libraries together.
At Full Blown Web Design, ColdFusion isn't a nostalgia act. It's the primary stack we build on, and we've been doing it for nearly 30 years — through every major version, every security era, and every database transition. That depth is why clients bring us the ColdFusion projects other firms won't look at twice.
What We Build
What we build on ColdFusion
Customer portals
Secure logins, account management, status and history views, document delivery, and self-service that cuts your support load.
Internal dashboards
KPIs, pipelines, and operational views pulled live from your data — the daily screen your team actually opens, not a report they avoid.
Quoting & order systems
Line-item estimates, approval workflows, order tracking, and the handoffs between sales, ops, and finance that usually live in email today.
Inventory & job tracking
Stock levels, job status, and material tracking that reflect reality instead of a spreadsheet's best guess.
APIs & integrations
REST endpoints, third-party service connections, and data exchange that keeps your systems from becoming islands.
Data-driven websites
Marketing sites with real back ends: dynamic content, search, forms with routing, and SEO-clean output.
Why ColdFusion Fits
Why it's still the right tool for business applications
The honest pitch isn't "ColdFusion is the newest." It's ColdFusion is the densest. A framework-based stack gets you the same capabilities — ORM, caching, auth, mail — but you assemble it: pick the libraries, wire the middleware, keep the versions compatible, and own the upgrade path. With ColdFusion, that infrastructure is the platform.
For a small team maintaining a business-critical application, that density has a name: lower maintenance surface. Fewer moving parts means fewer things to break, fewer CVEs to chase across a dependency tree, and a codebase a new developer can actually read.
And because we're a design shop as well as a ColdFusion shop, the applications we ship don't look like internal tools. They look like products — because they're designed, not just generated.
Our ColdFusion standards
- Adobe ColdFusion 2023 as the primary runtime
- CFC-based architecture — no inline logic in markup
- Parameterized queries via
cfqueryparam, always - Input validation and output encoding on every boundary
- Centralized error handling with safe user-facing messages
- Caching and performance budgets treated as requirements
- Tag-based CFML for readability and team consistency
How We Work
What a ColdFusion engagement looks like
Most ColdFusion work we do falls into three shapes, and we'll tell you which one fits before writing a line of code:
- Build. A new application or module, designed and engineered from requirements — scoped, estimated, and delivered on a milestone schedule.
- Rescue. A system that's slow, risky, or held together by whoever wrote it last. We audit, stabilize, and document — then hand you options.
- Evolve. Ongoing development: new features, integrations, and the steady improvement that keeps a business app from decaying.
Every engagement includes the parts other firms skip: security review, performance measurement, and documentation. You should never have to guess what a system does or how to change it.
*<-- every value bound, never concatenated --*>
<cfquery name="qOrders" datasource="#app.ds#">
SELECT id, customer, total, created
FROM orders
WHERE status = :status
AND customer_id = :custId
ORDER BY created DESC
</cfquery>
<cfset qOrders.params.status = validateStatus(form.status)>
<cfset qOrders.params.custId = validateCust(form.cust)>Go Deeper
The rest of the ColdFusion practice
FAQ
ColdFusion development, answered
Deciding whether to hire? The hire a ColdFusion developer page covers process, timelines, and what to expect.