I
thought I had read this somewhere, about not being able to use "
cf" as a prefix to a function, but when I defined all those functions in scriptaGulous with that prefix, and it let me, I thought maybe I made the whole thing up.
But then today I was having a look through the
docs for cfscript, and I found this:
Caution: ... You cannot put a user-defined function whose name begins with any of these strings within this tag:
-
cf
-
cf_
-
_cf
-
coldfusion
-
coldfusion_
-
_coldfusion
However, so far it has let me with no problems. What shall be done?
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Timothy Farrar
brought up an issue about scriptaGulous that I thought was a good one (and one I've worried a bit about).
Should people start using
the scriptaGulous library and Adobe decides to start naming functions after tags (i.e.,
cfQuery()), then a lot of code will break unless they start honoring your functions over theirs instead of throwing errors, as is currently the case.
He suggested using an underscore convention (
_cfQuery(), and
Andrew Powell proposed a
tagFunctionName() style convention.
But what are the odds Adobe would start naming functions
cfTagName()? Any idea from the guys over there would be appreciated, as well as anyone else with any input. Would
tagFunctionName() as opposed to
cfFunctionName() (or
tagQuery() over
cfQuery()) work better? I'm partial to the underscore method if it is needed, but obviously I prefer just simple
tagName() the most.
What are your thoughts?
First I wanted to thank
Andrew Powell for his gracious offer to help on this project.
Then, the update:
The
ScriptaGulous RIAForge page (as does the
SVN repository) has a zip with a file that actually compiles now, so you can start using it in your projects.
There are a couple of tags that were removed, such as
cfloop and
cfoutput, where it doesn't make sense to have them (unless we decide to use closures). Some tags, such as
cfmail and
cfhttp include extra parameters for their respective "params." The general guideline followed is that it is an array of structs - each struct is full of name/value pairs that represent the param tag's attributes and values you want to give those attributes. Please have a look at the hints, and if they aren't clear, feel free to ask us (or tell us what doesn't work) at the
issue tracker at RIAForge or the
scriptaGulous Google group.
More...
There has been some suggestion about packaging this into CFCs (and I like that idea). That will happen down the line (when someone has time to sort through and categorize the tags), but I see it as being an option to use instead of simply including the entire file. So basically, I'm thinking related functions/tags will be in separate libraries, and then the respective CFCs will include them, and a monster CFC might aggregate all the individual ones (not sure about the monster CFC, but I think a monster file would be good for include purposes if you choose that route).
I want to stress that I only checked that it
compiles. I've got some non-CF work to do over the next couple of days, so if anyone has CF work to do and wants to use it, we'd appreciate any comments on what works, what doesn't, and what works but not how you might expect. Again, feel free to tell us these things using the
issue tracker at RIAForge or the
scriptaGulous Google group. I'll commit to responding and fixing things relatively quickly (most likely within the same day).
Today I put some code into the
scriptaGulous repository at RIAForge. (scriptaGulous is a function library that intends to duplicate all the ColdFusion tags (where it makes sense) to make them usable in
cfscript blocks).
Basically, I wrote a generator to read the
taglib.cftld and generate some code for us to start with. I was going to generate some unit tests too, but I've got to move on to doing some other work.
Anyway, I'm sure plenty of the tags/functions actually do work, but when you
cfinclude scriptagulous.cfm, you'll get attribute validation errors in some of the tags.
So now on to the next stage of development: making all the tags work. For that, we need your help! (if you want to use this sooner rather than later)
If you'd like to commit to contributing a tag or two (or more!), please join the
scriptaGulous Google Group and record which tags you're working on so we don't duplicate our efforts.
