Great point Jordan--to take advantage of some of the cool new stuff in Blackstone you're going to have to be well-versed in CFCs. Ben Forta has been covering some of the more fine-grained features slated to be included in Blackstone on his blog: http://forta.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=c&catid=2
Great mention of the "Discovering CFCs" book. It's a bit dated since it was actually written in the CFMX 6.0 time frame so it has workarounds that weren't even necessary in 6.1, but I really hope they update it for Blackstone. Hal has a really great way of describing OO to people who aren't familiar with it and the way he presents things makes the learning curve seem a lot less steep. Matt On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 17:36:13 -0800 (PST), Jordan Gouger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Well, I was going to chip in my $.02 about this, but Matt covered most of > what I wanted to say. Hal Helms has written a book called Discovering CFC's, > which is very informative. As Matt mentioned also, OOP is essentially the > Defacto standard in programming now-a-days, and Macromedia is pushing CFCs > and their usage very heavily. It would not surprise me if in the next major > release (Blackstone or beyond) that Macromedia's standards for programming > will be through CFCs exclusively. > > Jordan Gouger > > > > Matt Woodward <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > As you might imagine that's a pretty big question. :-) I'll try and > gather up some resources and send them out, and then we might want to > hit this at a future meeting. Even though CFMX has been out for quite > a while now I suspect there are a lot of people in your situation, and > honestly it does get pretty detailed pretty quickly to truly > understand the concepts behind using CFCs. They're easy to get going > with, but there's no one-line answer that would address your other > concerns without a bit of background first. > > At a high level there are several reasons to use CFCs, and in many > ways these are the same reasons you want to use some of the other > methods we're all familiar with (UDFs, custom tags, includes): code > reuse, better code organization/lack of spaghetti code, etc. What > CFCs open the door to, however, is the world of object-oriented > programming (OOP), which if you come from a procedural background can > be a bit of a learning curve. People have argued (even on this list > not long ago) over the advantages and disadvantages of OOP, but the > computer programming community as a whole has more or less spoken on > this topic, and OOP is now a de facto standard way of programming. > Also bear in mind that OOP has been around a LONG time by this point, > so the fact that we as CFers are just now jumping on board means we > have some catching up to do. > > I wrote a blog entry based on a presentation Hal Helms gave at the > CFUN conference this year, and it got picked up on the ColdFusion > Developer's Journal site. Since it was originally a blog entry it may > be a bit less formal than I would have made it as an actual article, > but I stand behind the sentiments: > http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=46603 > > You might also want to go straight to the source and check out Hal > Helms' own web site: > http://halhelms.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=newsletters.detail > http://halhelms.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=writings.detail > > I personally think this would make a great topic for a future meeting. > We've talked about CFCs at a technical level (how they work, what > they do), but I think without a deeper understanding of the why behind > CFCs, people may have trouble getting on board with them. > > I'll ponder this and post as I remember other resources, and if others > have interest I think an OOP/CFC meeting in the near future would be > great. Actually it would fit pretty well in February with the other > speaker we have planned. > > Hope that helps a bit, > Matt > > On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 17:22:27 -0600, Ryan Everhart > wrote: > > I think Matt had a good idea, lets start a thread here talking about CFCs. > > > > I'm really clueless when it comes to seeing how these are useful. I > > re ad Ben Forta's introduction to CFCs and failed to see how it's any > > > > more than a included page almost or a custom tag. > > > > Introduction to ColdFusion Components > > http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/coldfusion/articles/intro_cfcs.html > > > > Does anyone have any real world examples or situations where these maybe > useful? > > > > Ryan > > ---------------------------------------------------------- > > To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > To unsubscribe: > > http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberUnsubscribe.cfm > > To subscribe: > > http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberRegistration.cfm > > > > > > > -- > Matt Woodward > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.mattwoodward.com > ---------------------------------------------------------- > To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > To unsubscribe: > http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberUnsubscribe.cfm > To subscribe: > http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberRegistration.cfm > > > > > > > -- Matt Woodward [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mattwoodward.com ---------------------------------------------------------- To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberUnsubscribe.cfm To subscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberRegistration.cfm
