ColdFusion 9 and my favorite improvement!

Recently I have spent alot of time blogging on Railo and haven't had a chance to talk about some of the excellent new features of ColdFusion 9. Probably the most anticipated feature for me is full script support I'm so glad they decided to implement this. Another excellent feature is how they have fixed up the need to call init() on components as a "semi" constructor.

Check out what you can do now:

<br /> <cfscript><br /> import Vehicle;<br /> <br /> ferrari = new Vehicle("Ferrari",4,true);<br /> mini = new Vehicle("Mini",4,false);<br /> harly = new Vehicle("Harly Daidson",2,true);<br /> <br /> writeDump(ferrari);<br /> writeDump(mini);<br /> writeDump(harly);<br /> </cfscript><br />

<br /> component{<br /> property type;<br /> property wheels;<br /> property highPowered;<br /> <br /> public Vehicle function init(string type, integer wheels, boolean highPowered ){<br /> this.setType(arguments.type);<br /> this.setWheels(arguments.wheels);<br /> this.setHighPowered(arguments.highPowered);<br /> return this;<br /> }<br /> }<br />

Notice the use of the implicit setters love this aswell properties are protected and are accessible only by getters() and setters().

It's not a real constructor we are used to in actionscript, java, c++ ect ( method name the same as the object ) but its pretty close and apart from the name, functions the same way.

I love the new syntax the code feels clean and there less of it.



......Update
After a quick chat with Justin Carter we can actually specify the name on the method we want to use as the constructor. Awsome no more init() methods needed.

<br /> component initmethod="Vehicle" {<br /> property type;<br /> property wheels;<br /> property highPowered;<br /> <br /> public Vehicle function Vehicle(string type, integer wheels, boolean highPowered ){<br /> this.setType(arguments.type);<br /> this.setWheels(arguments.wheels);<br /> this.setHighPowered(arguments.highPowered);<br /> return this;<br /> }<br /> }