Today I received the following comment here, on an older post on Variables and Naming Conventions:
...I wish Adobe would publish and adopt some kind of
official naming convention. Sometimes reading sample code written in
some other convention can make things harder to follow...
It was almost funny that this comment had come in when it had. Recently I was doing a lot of research for a User Group presentation I just did on the new ColdFusion 8 Ajax Components (have to re-record it before public release). In the process, I spent a great deal of time going over documentation all over the internet, from
LiveDocs to countless blogs, absorbing the wealth of information that is already out there. It was outstanding that there were so many resources out there for people to learn from. On the other hand, it was a little sad that so much of the sample code was written in ways that can really start new developers off with some bad habits.
I'm not perfect, by any means, but I try to pay careful attention to the code that I place on this blog for readers to use and learn from. One thing that I attempt to do is pay attention to basic Web Standards, like using XHTML (the current standard) instead of HTML, keeping styles in the stylesheet, and having unobtrusive JavaScript. I don't always do it, sometimes it doesn't make sense for a quick example, but I try, especially within code downloads. I also try to adhere to my own Coding Guidelines, so that code appears to be consistent and easy to read and understand.
Probably the one that bothers me the most, and that I see most prevalent in blogs, documentation, and books, is the lack of proper variable scoping. I know that, often, we're just publishing quick examples, but this can be an extremely detrimental practice. I have worked on some very large enterprise applications, with years of code written by half-a-dozen different developers, most of whom learned their ColdFusion (and development) skills through the docs or a book. Many had actually come up with some very creative and effective algorithms to fix some issue, or create some new whiz bang feature, but their code was so poorly scoped that, after time, it could take down the server. Why? How? Enterprise sites may contain several hundred (or thousand) templates, containing dozens of variables on each page, and can potentially be hit by hundreds (or thousands) of users simultaneously. Multiply the number of variables by the number of pages by the number of users, then imagine ColdFusion doing a ScopeCheck on each one, to figure out which scope each variable requested belongs in. Even if the variable is in the VARIABLES scope, it's still that many times ScopeCheck will be called while rendering a page.
Still not convinced? Go download varScoper, and run it on your project root folder, including your subfolders, and see what it comes up with. Yeah, I'm still in shock. Cleanup on that is easier on a small subproject scale, but it's definitely forced me to think better when I'm writing my code, paying attention as I go, to minimize the performance impact of my applications, no matter how small it may be. I learned my bad habits from the docs, various books, sample code slung around on the CF-Talk list. I've continued to realize that there are better ways of doing things (like OOP and frameworks), and adjust my style and methods, and I think it's important to consider these 'best practices' when contributing. A little more code, but the right thing to do in the end, for you, your app, and your systems.
So, if you own a site of documentation, revise it. If you're writing a book, edit it. If you publish a CF blog, live it. The up-and-coming are reading us all of the time to find out how to use this wonderful language. Let's try to show 'em how to do it the right way. You might not follow any guidelines at all, within your development, but this scoping thing is way too important to gloss over, and will only help everyone in the long run.
