CodFusion

So, I will be posting my blog entries in series with a basic underlining theme. This first series will be things I wish Adobe would address in ColdFusion 9, aka Centaur.

So in the early days of ColdFusion, I used a function called parameterexists()  If you don't know about this function, that's a good thing because I believe it was deprecated back in ColdFusion 4.0  Today, you should be using isDefined() or structKeyExists() instead.

But here's the funny thing, if you wanted to, you could still use this deprecated function. It still works today in ColdFusion 8. This of course is just one example and by the way there are several tags, functions and attributes that have been deprecated over the years. Adobe provides a full list of deprecated items since ColdFusion 5 at http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/8/htmldocs/help.html?content=Tags-pt0_21.html

So, a great (or bad) thing about ColdFusion is that it has been very good about backward compatibility. Many of these things run just like they did before, but it would be nice to have the ability to tell the ColdFusion server to ignore or error out on deprecated items. Just a simple toggle in the ColdFusion admin that if turn on would throw a deprecation error back if you tried to run a deprecated item. Naturally, this feature would be of great use in development to clean up older CF applications.