Nobody can argue that Coldfusion is RAD. But at what cost? There seem two be two groups of Coldfusion programmers: Those that are hardcore programmers and don't worry too much about the front-end, and those who program decently, and also work with the front end. (Maybe there are some who are great at both, I don't know) I really don't know which party is better, or if there even is a better group to fall under.

But what I do wonder is if sometimes we do the other group a disservice by not understanding enough of what they are dealing with. I, for one, like to use the strict doctype in my websites. Now, someone who is a Coldfusion programmer might come alone and put a CFForm into the code. Even if there isn't any validation going on, Coldfusion puts a bit of garbage script (still valid, just ugly) in the header. But then the guy who is all about clean, perfect code is going to come in and take out that Cfform and add his own form with some custom-written validation.

There are better examples than just cfform, but I think that the point is made. Is it worth spending more time on writting our app/website code to make sure that it is exactly what we need and nothing that we don't (thus potentially reducing the load on the server as well as the load time, or is it better to save man-hours and just use the built in code that Coldfusion offers?

Coldfusion Administrator

Here lies another problem with using the built-in Coldfusion functions (obviously not all of them, as without using any functions why are you using CF?). There are some problems with functions that rely on settings (ServiceFactory, cfTimer [although that should mostly be for debugging], cfregistry) in the Coldfusion Administrator (although I guess that php has that problem with the "magic_quotes" function). And for those of us who are on shared servers and cannot access the Administrator, we are comepletely out of luck. So if you are writing an app on a dedicated server, is it better to save time now and use the built in functions, or is it better to save yourself from a headache in case of going to a shared server.

It seems like we are going to lose performance somewhere, we just get to pick. Do we want to lose time ourselves, or do we care if we slow the server down a little bit?

Cftimer Alternate

Here is what I do instead of cftimer (that way I don't have to rely on the administrator settings).  I put the following code into either a cfc, or you can just put it in the head of the page.  Once you have done that just wrap the function calls around your code that you wish to test.  Download the code