Hoth for ColdFusion 8:Bare-bones Edition

Hoth is a great idea.

If you haven’t heard of it, then check out http://aarongreenlee.com/share/hoth-coldfusion-errors-tracking-reporting/

Hoth aims to help developers better understand exceptions—caught or not—in their application so you can prioritize resolution. Hoth is a simple but effective exception content tracking system.

Hoth works on ColdFusion 9.01 and Railo. The downside is that I mostly work with ColdFusion 8 applications. (We’ll upgrade to version 10 when it rolls out.) I want a better error handling solution for these applications and I’m sure others are in a similar situation.

Luckily, Hoth is pretty simple. It was fairly easy to convert code from script based components to tag based components. I left most of the code intact via cfscript blocks inside functions, but I had to convert some things to tags like cflock and cfdirectory.

I found this project pretty interesting and insightful. Converting new object( .. ) code to CF8 style createObject( .. ).init( .. ) really shows off how much code CF9 saves you from writing. The other big time saver from CF9 is accessors = true. I used some regex and snippets to shorten the time creating get and set functions, but it took a lot longer to write than 2 words.

I’ve only converted the minimal amount to get Hoth running on a basic installation. I haven’t converted any of the examples or unit tests (I know, I know). Unit tests are next on the priority for conversion.