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Christine and I, having settled into our new jobs, are rolling up our sleeves to dig in and start some hardcore re-factoring. The legacy applications we are dealing with run smoothly and quickly for the most part, but are teetering on the edge of being un-maintainable. They suffer from the standard trademarks of any legacy code which has seen many programmers over the years-- lack of code reuse, absent standards, poorly normalized data structures, and minimal separation of view, business, and data. Don't think I'm knocking it too hard though. It's probably not much different than a lot of the code bases out there. We believe it can be better though. Easier to maintain, understand, and extend. Enter our plan for world domination...

I have been enjoying my dip into Flex so far. Sometimes you don't notice habits until you have to change them. One rut I've gotten into over the years is the procedural way web-based apps have gotten be thinking about programming.

There has been a lot of talk recently about design patterns aimed at circumventing the overhead ColdFusion imposes upon us when creating CFCs. I'm not sure who coined the term "Object Instantiation Penalty", but the first reference to it I can find in the CF community was over at the Dot Matrix blog. Everyone seems to agree that object creation in ColdFusion leaves something to be desired, but I haven't seen anyone really quantify the price yet. I decided some line charts were in order.

The other day I was writing a wrapper CFC to consume a web service, and return the results. Several of the web services' method returned arrays of structs and I was in the mood to experiment, so I decided to have my CFC present the data back as an array of components. I knew that there would really never be more than 20 or 30 objects coming back so the cost of object instantiation wouldn't be a big deal. There were 7 different "types" of objects coming back in the various method containing mostly strings and an occasional binary image. I didn't want to do all the typing so I decided to toy with Object Synthesization similar to what Peter Bell has been talking about.

If you missed it, Jeff Chastain put up a very interesting post over at Alagad's Blog. Also good was the "spirited" discussion that followed between Barney and Peter Bell. I don't know how I feel about all of it, but the entire thing is very fascinating.

I've been staring at my computer monitor trying start this paragraph for about 10 minutes now, so I'm just going to start typing. I've been thinking about system design. Organization versus performance. Design patterns versus efficiency. We adopt some code without thought to its performance because we're talking about milliseconds, and the readability, organization, and structure gains our apps enjoy are well worth it. I'm not sure that is always the case though, and we don't notice it until too late.

In the beginning was assembly, and it was with the programmer and it was good. Through it all programs that have been made were written, without it no programs were written. The compiler shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. Then came a design pattern sent by Alan Kay, its name was OOP. The other day, someone asked me a really dumb question. "Why are there so many programming languages? Why don't you just all use one?" Ok, that was two questions, and they aren't really dumb, but I felt kinda' dumb trying to answer them.

As promised, I have written a Java Servlet Filter to remove cookies from a request. If you don't know what a Servlet Filter is, read this blog. Let me start by saying while my filter does function like I wanted it to, it did NOT solve this problem. I'll blog on that next. UPDATE: Here are my findings Given that, I can't really think of a real-world use for this code, but I am always in favor of coding for the sake of learning.

Sometimes I wonder about ColdFusion. Mostly when it gets depressed and locks itself in the bathroom with a box of chocolates. Seriously though, the identity of CF can sometimes be illusive when you listen to what everybody wants all at once. ColdFusion is different than most languages and I think that's a good thing, but what pushes us to request the changes we want? Do we wish CF was easier to pick up for the beginner? Perhaps we want it to behave a bit more like our favorite scripting language for our benefit or to impress our friends.

I have been pouring over the latest Fusion Authority Quarterly Update, and particularly liked Sean Cornfield's article "Beans and DAOs and Gateways, Oh My!" I am pretty familiar with the four application layers he describes, but have had difficulty at times reconciling all the diverse ways I see those implemented. (design patterns) I feel I have a good grasp on OOP, but most of my current application is still on a version of Fusebox 4 which was modified to the point of not being easily upgradeable. We have tried to do new development in MachII, but my exposure has been modest.