Automatically Proxy Java Objects in ColdFusion 8

Mark Mandel, the creator of Transfer ORM for ColdFusion, has posted on about an upcoming update to his JavaLoader component for dynamically loading Java classes into ColdFusion without requiring that they be added to the ColdFusion classpath. In this instance he uses ColdFusion 8's new functionality (including onMissingMethod() support) to create an automatic ColdFusion Component (CFC) proxy for the Java class rather than returning an instance of the class itself. Very interesting and potentially useful stuff for deeper CF/Java integration.

Writing my own JavaProxy for ColdFusion 8 using onMissingMethod

Usually I save this stuff for my open source updates, but this one I found particularly fascinating personally - particularly since I had a similar idea when I read about the onMissingMethod() support in ColdFusion 8. Nonetheless, looking at Mark's code, it is clear that my working on this would have been like Miss Teen South Carolina at a Mensa conference. Nice work Mark!

Just in case some of your readers missed Miss South Carolina's performance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww

Holy crap that's funny! I couldn't decipher her answer, so I think I may have lost IQ points just by listening to her. ;o) What's sad is that she's in a competition to basically become a role model for young girls.

onMissingMethod is probably the most powerful new feature in CF8 in terms of the impact to what we can do stylistically in the language.

I'm particularly attached to this feature because I asked one of the CF team to implement it, in a hallway conversation back at Adobe in early 2006 :)

It opens up a whole new world - go read about #doesNotUnderstand in Smalltalk and :method_missing in Ruby!

I have an article on this in the upcoming FAQU issue about ColdFusion 8 which will be published shortly...