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OO Nearly Destroyed A Business?

There is an excellent, albeit long, post by Marc Funaro entitled "How OO Almost Destroyed My Business"

In short, the article describes how going to the effort of applying Java OO rules to CF's dynamic behavior on every project can take you away from your main goal.

I do agree with some of the points made but I think there is something everyone has got to remember. OO is a must for some languages, but when it comes to ColdFusion you're allowed to make a choice on your coding style for the application you are building. If you come from an OO background and you want your recordset as an object do it, use Transfer or another ORM and apply it. If you just want to organise your logic away from your views you can use CFC's to simply handle that. If you are building a 3 page leaflet site then you can throw one together using procedural code with <cfmodule> to wrap a layout around 3 .cfm pages. Thats the beauty of CF and it always will be.

From my point of view when building an application my goal is plain, make sure the client get a solid app and to do this it's simple: organise your code, stick to a particular methodology or framework, and remain consistent. If you do this you will always be able to revisit your application and make changes quickly and efficiently regardless of your coding style.

With all that said, always find out what the next guy is learning/teaching and give it a try. But after that don't be afraid to say it doesn't fit what I am working on currently so I'm moving on.

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Well said.

I read that blog post too.. I also agree with some of it.

My personal experience has been rather favorable in regards to learning some "OO" and a few of the CF Frameworks... while I won't say that the apps that I've used one of those frameworks on is coded in "perfect OO adherence".... they have (i believe) achieved they're targets... in that the apps work well and they are consistent in their structure and flow.

Adding tools and experience in the toolbox is a good thing... even if you only use a certain tool every so often.
Adam's Gravatar Posted By Adam @ 5/27/09 11:09 AM
I agree with Marc in many respects. I see CF as an abstraction of Java, taking away many of the complexities and increasing development speed. Why try and complicate matters? You might as well use Java and get the benefits of the Enterprise plaform.

I use CF for the less complex stuff (eg. db driven web applications) and java for more sophisticated applications (Not web if I can help it). I still like the combo of a CF front end powered by Java business logic for enterprise apps.

Cheers, Adam
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