ColdFusion Contest - Final Entries
So, this contest has taken way longer than I thought it would, but that just speaks to how many responses I got, which I think is a good thing. If you haven't looked at the previous entries, I suggest that you do so. I'm going to quickly link to and point out the final two entries, and tonight I will pick a winner. (Along with releasing Starfish Version 0 hopefully.)
The first entry works pretty well, and has an interesting feature. If it catches you fibbing about your number, it will call you a lier. Nice. One thing I noticed about this sample is an odd use of "this" in the code. Here is a sample that I've mashed together:
<cfset request.this.title = "Guess The Number">
<cfset session.this.guessrange = 100>
I've pinged the writer to see why he uses scope.this.var and hopefully he will respond. That being said, I do have a problem with this. ColdFusion will let you automatically create a structure without using structNew(). Consider this code block:
<cfset z.y = "foo">
<cfdump var="#z#">
This works, but is dangerous. If for some reason you added <cfset z = 1> before the cfset above, the code will not work and will throw this error: You have attempted to dereference a scalar variable of type class java.lang.String as a structure with members. Simply adding the structNew() fixes the problem:
<cfset z = 1>
<cfset z = structNew()>
<cfset z.y = "foo">
<cfdump var="#z#">
So in general, I'd probably always recommend against relying on ColdFusion to automatically create a structure for you as the author did above.
The last entry gets bonus points for providing both a CFC version as well as a basic version. I didn't have much to say about this one so for now I'm just providing the links so folks can play with it.
So that's it! Tonight I will announce a winner (which I'm sure no one will disagree with, ahem) so check back again.