In part three of this primer, we discussed how an object’s variables scope exists only within itself and is available to any function it contains. Now we need to cover how and why to make a variable only available to a single function.

An object generally knows only about itself, the data contained in its own variables scope. In order for an object to know about external data, it needs a way to “see” it. Passing data into an object, often only when it is created, is called data injection.

We’ve covered how to write an Object.cfc, as well as how to create an instance of it. In order to understand how to use objects with Coldfusion, we have to first discuss what is and isn’t inside an object.

Think of a Coldfusion Component, first introduced in Coldfusion 6, as a container, an object. Inside this object you can store related data, manage related functions, access data sources, implement business logic and more. While Coldfusion is not an Object Oriented Programming Language, using components, we can implement OO programming concepts and solve recurring problems using design patterns.

A problem was posted to CF-Talk about CF locking a file when using java.io.FileReader. You may run into the same problem when parsing files using CF 6 or 7. Fortunately, Coldfusion 8 (Scorpio) has eliminated the process of calling java directly by updating CFLOOP.

My last post about BlogCFC and YUI garnered a very telling comment: “Very nice work!! Now take the time to do some whitespace management on the rest of the site… :)”. Well here’s why I had that problem to begin with and how I fixed it.

My company recently launched a new version of our site. The original CSS layout has some issues and YUI Grids saved the day in no time flat. Using Ray Camden’s BlogCFC, this is an example of how quickly you can change your site’s layout with YUI Grids.

This subject came up a few weeks ago on the DFW CFUG mailing list and again this week on the CF-Talk list. Here are some of the issues you’ll face when moving a Coldfusion application from Windows to Linux.

Ben Forta presented Coldfusion 8 (Scorpio) to the DFW CFUG tonight. We had a huge turn out, including some old friends and former coworkers. As the Scorpio tour progresses, Ben will be unveiling new features at each stop so we saw stuff that hadn’t yet been presented anywhere else.

I was responding to “CFC interaction and persistent scopes (newbie questions)” on the CFCDEV list and it turned into this post.