Comments on: Using variables.instance inside your components

By: chapter31 » Blog Archive » Coding standards, do you use them?

chapter31 » Blog Archive » Coding standards, do you use them? — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 09:45:40 +0000

[...] the variables scope) to the cfc unless you var scope them. This being the case a lot of people have global cfc variables inside a struct, often called something like variables.instance. This enables you to easily distinguish calls to [...]

By: Variables In Javascript

Variables In Javascript — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:45:55 +0000

anybody here know of a good site to find more info on variables in javascript? I\’ve got this site bookmarked and im gonna keep checking it out, but i still would like to find a site that covers variables in javascript a little more thoroughly..thanks

By: Peter J. Farrell

Peter J. Farrell — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 20:33:34 +0000

I think that variables.instance is the defacto standard in the CF community. The argument about “self” being shorter to type isn’t a great argument since beans follow such a simple pattern that my tool like Rooibos can easily generation them for you. Nobody should be hand typing beans any more.

By: Michael Sharman

Michael Sharman — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 00:04:22 +0000

@Adam

Yeah it’s interesting, I was talking to a colleague the other day about something like that and I was thinking that some things in the community you could say are ’standards’. Naming a variables.instance could be one of those?

I mean, it doesn’t really matter what you call it right? But if other developers are looking at your code and *most* people use variables.instance, does that put more pressure on you to use that defacto standard?

By: Adam Ness

Adam Ness — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 22:22:40 +0000

I’ve been doing this for about the last year, but Instead of “instance” i’m using a variable named “self”, i.e.

It’s faster to type than instance.

By: jim collins

jim collins — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 15:39:51 +0000

I’m not thrilled about instance as the structure name, I’d normally have say a widget bean and inside it have variables.widget = StructNew();

By: Peter Bell

Peter Bell — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:15:20 +0000

Glad I’m not the only one doing this!
http://www.pbell.com/index.cfm/2007/6/10/Distinguishing-Properties-from-Methods

By: Michael Long

Michael Long — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 17:58:34 +0000

Personally, I’d only do this when:

1) I have no control over the names I might be adding to a component (as in a DTO), and want to avoid collisions.
2) I’m swapping entire sets of values (as in a DTO).
3) I’m caching the entire set of values.

Do it for a single object and the performance would be negligible. Do it as a matter of convenience for every component in the system, needed or not, and I suspect that all you’re doing is adding the cost of creating a struct to the already high cost of creating a component.

By: Al Davidson

Al Davidson — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 10:48:00 +0000

Another benefit is that it makes it trivial to write a duplication/clone method, or the equivalent of a copy constructor.