Sam Farmer

Liking using implicit arguments for ColdFusion 9 functions

Each new version of a computer language inevitably brings about changes, mostly for the better, in the style of writing that language.

One change I have enjoyed with ColdFusion 9 is using implicit structures as arguments to a function.  This leads to bundling of arguments into structures in cases where it makes more sense.  Granted this has been going on in languages like JavaScript (and even the ColdFusion Javascript functions!) for a long time.  There are definitely good and bad reasons to use this style.

Lets take a function, written with arguments individually defined, and see how this works:

That can be rewritten to:

This time we put all the cache settings in the cache argument.

Advantages:

• All cache settings are put in one structure.
• These arguments can potentially be defined in one application wide place and passed in easily (in a similar way that argumentCollection can be used).

Disadvantages:

• Slightly harder to document and validate

As I mentioned earlier I'm not suggesting using this for every function but for those that have a collection of config or style options it can work well.  This is seen in a lot of JavaScript functions and used widely by jQuery.

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