About

Nolan Erck is an in-demand software consultant based in Sacramento, CA. He provides software development, training, and other consulting expertise to a variety of companies across the United States. Nolan has been developing software professionally for more than 15 years, starting in the video game industry as a Tools Programmer advancing to web development in 1999. He has worked on high profile projects for LucasArts, Maxis, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, Schools Credit Union, and Alive N Kicking Magazine among others. His list of credits includes Grim Fandango, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, SimPark, and SimSafari, as well as high-traffic websites for a variety of technology based companies. Nolan currently co-manages the Sacramento ColdFusion User Group and is an active member of the Web Developer community, giving presentations on Object-Oriented Programming and Web Development for groups across Northern California. When he's not consulting or talking about himself in the third person, Nolan can usually be found working on one of several music projects.

Modularity shoot-out: CFInclude vs CFModule vs Custom Tags, vs CFFunction

There are lots of procedural applications still in Production today; apps that were originally built on ColdFusion 4.x but still need regular maintenance and updates. Maybe the server has since been updated to CF9, but the developers in charge haven't had the chance to learn ways to write reusable code beyond the CFInclude tag.

In this presentation will go over the basics of CFInclude, CFModule, Custom Tags, and CFFunctions. We will show pros and cons of each, sample code where one construct may be more appropriate than another, and we'll also do a quick "speed comparison" between them as well.

This is a talk for beginner developers, or intermediate developers that just haven't had the opportunity to go beyond some of the older ColdFusion functionality. No knowledge of object-oriented programming is required.