Argument over ColdFusion OOP

My production manager has been trying so hard to think of ways to improve our code maintainability – rightly, he has considered Object Oriented Programming (OOP) as a possible solution to the problem.

Some of us in the team are really supportive to this. He’s quite excited as for the first time in few years he has in the team:

And so for the past few weeks, the few of us have been experimenting as well as giving out presentations to the team to introduce frameworks and OOP concepts. Even if we don’t pursue OOP in the end, at least in this journey is not wasted everyone gets to expand their horizon.

So today my colleague did a presentation on CFCs + DAO, Gateway, Beans using Illudium PU-36 code generator. And then out of nowhere there was someone who became quite agitated and attacked the idea with citing performance issue that is introduced by CFC.

I think that’s really quite out of line – I wasn’t the one who did the presentation – but I felt offended in some way, he obviously has no idea the effort the team has put in! Some of us did reading, coding, building proof of concepts OUTSIDE company hours, we truly believe what we are promoting is for the company’s best interest. Even now at 12:30am I am doing some research on this topic.

There was an allegation thrown that since we did some more CFCs programming the system has become slower and resulted in servers needed to be restarted due to memory being full. I politely asked for the proof, which CFCs are causing this performance issue, he said it’s hard to produce – hmm.. right, would’ve been helpful if the person has done some investigation properly not just googling around for CFC and performance issues. I personally don’t believe that CFCs are the causes of those server issues mainly because we are still very conservative in our use of CFCs only a handful of them in the system (less than 50) and none of them are complex CFC by any means.

But having said that I want to be objective, I am happy to be proven wrong, if you can provide me with hard evidence – I am willing to accept the fact. What I object to today’s incident is the way such a person verbalized his opinion and without the backing of hard evidence.

We know OOP is not silver bullet – but it’s an alternative to solve our coding practice. We would gladly consider other options if there are any.

This is a matter of principality.