Cameron Childress recently professed his love for ColdFusion Lists and this got me thinking.
I started to wonder what are my favorite tags, which tags were the most fun, or coolest in my mind? So here’s my top ten coolest, funniest, or just plain great ColdFusion tags:
[list=1]
[*] CFSaveContent – I love creating some output in one place wrapping it up nicely in a cfsavecontent tag and then using it elsewhere. This tag has saved me from doing multiple queries many many times.
[*] CFOutput query=”myquery” group=”mygroup” – yea I know it’s almost a given because what would ColdFusion be without this tag? Well I like it when you combine it with the query and group attribute which makes spitting out a table with groups SO much easier then nested loops.
[*] CFLoop – Anyone who doesn’t think this is just the best way to do loops is crazy in my mind… no more deciding between a for loop, while, do while, etc.
[*] CFLocation – I love it, don’t belong here, or need to be somewhere else then CFLocation it!
[*] CFDump – As a guy in my office says “when in doubt, dump it” I honestly have no idea how people survived without CFDump.
[*] CFChart – build a 3D drill down chart in the time it takes to watch an episode of the Simpsons? sure I’ll buy that for a dollar!
[*] CFSwitch / CFCase – We switch like crazy at our office. forget giant IF/Else statements, switch it baby!
[*] CFMail – I love making mail scripts, with this tag it’s that much easier!
[*] CFModule / CFObject – I don’t know why but I just prefer to invoke my CFC’s and custom tags this way.
[*] CFTry / CFCatch – I learned about try/catch in my java classes and to me it’s the coolest way to prevent and trap errors.
[/list] And as my honorable mentions are:
[list=1]
[*] CFInclude – I’m an include freak I’m all about the smaller chunks of code versus monster 1500 line files.
[*] CFLdap – if you’ve ever dealt with an LDAP server you know the pain, and if you have the CFLdap tag you know how to alleviate that pain.
[*] CFXml – Just a great tag for creating great XML documents and objects.
[/list]
So what are your picks?
Eric Jones
