ColdFusion MVC With ColdBox: Moving From Spaghetti .cfm to Testable, Modular Code

ColdBox is the mature, conventions-based HMVC framework for ColdFusion (CFML), built by Ortus Solutions, and it’s the standard path out of tangled .cfm files where SQL, business logic, and HTML all live in one template. It gives you a clean separation — handlers (controllers), views (presentation), and models (business logic) — wired together by convention, with WireBox dependency injection so your models are testable in isolation, a router that maps clean URLs to handler actions, and tight TestBox integration so you can actually unit- and integration-test your app. The move is incremental, not a rewrite: you scaffold a ColdBox app with CommandBox (coldbox create app), then migrate page by page — pulling logic out of .cfm spaghetti into models, thinning views down to presentation, and routing requests through handlers. The payoff is code that's modular, reusable, team-friendly, and — critically — testable, which is nearly impossible with logic buried in procedural templates. This guide shows the architecture, the conventions, and the migration path with verified ColdBox specifics.
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