There is a poll at the bottom of this post, but it requires some background.

I’ve been teaching ColdFusion as part of a BS degree for a bit more than a year now. It’s been going well. The ColdFusion course follows courses in HTML, CSS, ActionScript, Flex, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, and SQL. I start with procedural CF, refactor that into a simple MVC pattern with UDFs, refactor that again into full OO with components, and refactor that a final time to use ORM and FW/1. The students get to see CF at multiple levels of complexity, and they get practice with taking older code and upgrading it to newer coding techniques.

But I have recently come to question the utility of starting with pure procedural CF. Is it still relevant?

The students get to my class with a heavy OO background from their ActionScript, Flex, and JavaScript courses. The PHP course serves as their introduction to server-side coding, and is purely procedural. So do I really need to revisit procedural server-side code (such as cfmodule)? Is the business need for entry-level CF coders to be able to code at all complexity levels, or would stronger OO and framework skills be better received?

You can’t have it both ways—there is a finite amount of class time.