
Finding the arguments about increased productivity, maintenance, employ-ability, and community testing persuasive, you may have finally decided to join the large number of people who are using an open source, ColdFusion community framework for their application development. Since the framework space has exploded in the last few years with so many new frameworks and so many different areas, it is very difficult to keep up. So you’re left with a hard task: deciding which framework, or even combination of frameworks, is right for you.
This article explores each framework area available today and gives brief overviews of some of the more popular ColdFusion framework implementations in those areas. The goal is to provide some perspective on the relatively vast landscape of ColdFusion community frameworks.
To make the most of this article you will need the following software and files:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License
Mark Mandel is the author of several open source projects, most notably Transfer ORM and JavaLoader and has been working with ColdFusion for a number of years, including at his very own dot com bomb back in the late 90s.
You can often find Mark blogging and consulting at www.compoundtheory.com, which has housed his thoughts on ColdFusion, Java and various other aspects of software development for several years. He can also be found as a regular poster on ColdFusion mailing lists as well as generally causing havoc in the #coldfusion channel on Dalnet irc network.