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Recent Blog Comments By Brian Kotek

• String Data Type Gotcha When Using CFGroovy

  Posted on Sep 14, 2009 at 12:43 PM

  Yes it's crucial to understand that Groovy Strings (GStrings) are not Strings. They are a separate class that does lazy initialization of the variables within it. That means that until toString() is called, the value isn't evaluated and transformed into a String. You can see more here, in p... read more »

• Learning ColdFusion 9: ORM Inheritance Mapping

  Posted on Aug 25, 2009 at 12:30 AM

  Good things to keep in mind when manually managing denormalized tables, Andrew. But Hibernate makes it very difficult (virtually impossible) to encounter modification anomalies, so I wouldn't worry about that in a Hibernate-managed setup.... read more »

• Learning ColdFusion 9: ORM Inheritance Mapping

  Posted on Aug 21, 2009 at 1:57 PM

  Well, it's done as "effectively" as one can do joins on indexed foreign keys. Which is pretty efficiently, but it will never be as fast as not having to do the joins at all. ;-)... read more »

• Learning ColdFusion 9: ORM Inheritance Mapping

  Posted on Aug 21, 2009 at 1:31 PM

  Ben, the main reason for single-table inheritance being the generally preferred option is performance. By using a single table to hold all of the subtypes, you remove a lot of joins that have to be added when using multiple tables. When you start getting into larger sets of objects or deeper inhe... read more »

• Learning ColdFusion 9: From SQL To ORM - A Conceptual Shift In Relationships

  Posted on Aug 3, 2009 at 5:54 PM

  Well first, I wouldn't say "all those property tags" add up to 60 lines of code. Ben puts every attribute on a separate line. He added 8 property tags. That's about 60 seconds of work. We also haven't seen the template of CFC that contained the original queries, which now don't need to exis... read more »

• Learning ColdFusion 9: From SQL To ORM - A Conceptual Shift In Relationships

  Posted on Aug 3, 2009 at 3:44 PM

  Jake, I'm assuming that Ben already had CFCs for his Contact, Company, and ContactInformation. So all that is really different is the CFProperty tags. In any application that uses CFCs, leveraging an ORM will actually reduce the amount of SQL, and thus the total amount of code, by a huge amount c... read more »

• Learning ColdFusion 9: From SQL To ORM - A Conceptual Shift In Relationships

  Posted on Aug 3, 2009 at 11:44 AM

  Ben, you're right that when you embed an object into another entity, Hibernate essentially merges the embedded object into the parent. So this is useful where you have common properties and behavior that you want to apply to numerous objects. But it doesn't create a separate object and as a resul... read more »

• Learning ColdFusion 9: From SQL To ORM - A Conceptual Shift In Relationships

  Posted on Aug 3, 2009 at 10:47 AM

  I don't think so Ben, all you should need to do is specify "embedded=true" in the cfcomponent tag.... read more »

• Learning ColdFusion 9: From SQL To ORM - A Conceptual Shift In Relationships

  Posted on Aug 3, 2009 at 10:36 AM

  Ben, you can also do this with an embedded object instead of a one to one mapping. The docs have full details.... read more »

• Do Remote CFC Method Calls Add Any Value In ColdFusion?

  Posted on May 18, 2009 at 1:00 PM

  "Regarding the security and granular control - to say that CFCs add more security features is based on an assumption that you would *not* have security with a standard front controller, which is hopefully not true" It is true, I don't implement security in the front controller for exactly t... read more »

• Do Remote CFC Method Calls Add Any Value In ColdFusion?

  Posted on May 18, 2009 at 12:08 PM

  Remote access CFC have very big benefits. First, they allow one to expose a method for consumption via AMF and SOAP in addition to JSON/AJAX. So on this point, there is no debate, since there is no way to expose a method as a web service or a Flex RemoteObject if it is not remote. The secon... read more »

• An Experiment In Non-Data-Type ColdFusion Components

  Posted on Apr 14, 2009 at 9:41 AM

  Yes, that's what they're saying. However, I wouldn't get totally hung up on that one. The goal here is to eliminate "primitive obsession" and ensure that the purpose of each object is clearly identified by its type. But I would say the other rules like small classes, one level of indention per me... read more »

• An Experiment In Non-Data-Type ColdFusion Components

  Posted on Apr 14, 2009 at 9:11 AM

  As you probably saw in my Object Calisthenics post, I chose to build a Bowling score engine. I found this to be pretty good, since it's not super complex but it's definitely not trivial either, and there is plenty of room to explore: How do you model the final frame vs. the standard frames? What... read more »

• An Experiment In Non-Data-Type ColdFusion Components

  Posted on Apr 13, 2009 at 2:20 PM

  Hi Ben. Just to be clear up front, it can be difficult to talk about OO design when the example being used is such a small application. As always, it's the double-edged sword: OO is difficult to understand for newcomers, so examples must be simple, but the benefits of OO are most apparent in larg... read more »

• An Experiment In Non-Data-Type ColdFusion Components

  Posted on Apr 13, 2009 at 10:57 AM

  It really doesn't have anything to do with "thinking in Java", but rather "thinking in objects". Ruby and Python may be dynamic, but they still have typing. I think that Ben has over-analyzed his problem and ended up with a solution of dubious value. Here are some of the reasons why I say this:read more »

• Form Helpers And Domain Objects As Data Types In Object Oriented Programming

  Posted on Apr 6, 2009 at 4:23 PM

  If you follow the "single responsibility" principle (leading to high cohesion), you want to limit the Controller to handling application flow. It's the "traffic cop". Shoving validation in there dilutes its cohesion and increases the reasons why it would need to change.... read more »

• Creating An Abstract Base Class In ColdFusion

  Posted on Mar 11, 2009 at 1:20 PM

  @Bim: ColdSpring won't know anything about the base class. If you're defining beans, those are the concrete implementations. So ColdSpring just calls the concrete class's constructor. Anything beyond that is up to you (like having the concrete constructor do a super.init()).... read more »

• jQuery UI 1.7 Released

  Posted on Mar 6, 2009 at 8:53 AM

  I guess between Flex and EXT I'm just spoiled, but even this latest version of jQuery UI looks terribly primitive compared to those other libraries. jQuery rocks for DOM manipulation. For UI components...not so much. Of course, it's free! Though even a commercial license for EXT is only $28... read more »

• Hal Helms - Real World Object Oriented Development, Sarasota - Day Two

  Posted on Feb 25, 2009 at 12:30 PM

  Hi Ben, sounds like you, Hal and Clark are having a great time so far! First, just to be pedantic, it's the "Open-Closed" principle. ;-) In terms of obeying this principle, I think that, like all OO principles, it's a guideline. It's not like the OO police will come shoot you if you m... read more »

• Hal Helms Real-World Object Oriented Programming (OOP) February Training And Discount Code

  Posted on Jan 6, 2009 at 1:50 PM

  For more information on the issue of domain models vs. relational databases, along with one of the main problems that ORMs are attempting to solve (called the "object-relational impedance mismatch"), have a look at: read more »