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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 > read 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
