Design Patterns in Coldfusion (Decorator Pattern)

Recently, I have become interested obsessed with design patterns.  What caused the spark of excitement was that I was working on an algorithm similar to one of the patterns (I can't remember which) when I read Head First Design Patterns and realized it had already been created for me! By the way, I'd recommend Head First, it's a great learning series.

Also, I use the term "class" for "component" and "method" for "function". So without further ado,  my first article on implementing design patterns in Coldfusion.

Decorator Pattern

A decorator more or less wraps a base class and well...decorates it. This can be useful when you have a scenario that would need a lot of classes to cover all of the possible combinations of objects.

My Implementation

I followed the example by Hal Helms as far as the class organization is concerned.  Some of the decorators are me being funny (piglatin and mirror), but I can see some value in the TableDecorator, JsonDecorator and XmlDecorator.

Let me explain each file a bit more.

• Test.cfm
  • Instantiates the components and outputs results
• Person.cfc
  • Base class (whose methods will be overridden by the decorators)
• PersonDecorator.cfc
  • Base decorator class (all decorators for Person will inherit from this class)
• PersonJsonDecorator.cfc
  • Creates a JSON representation of a Person.
• PersonXmlDecorator.cfc
  • Creates a XML representation of a Person by wrapping the elements with nodes that represent each element
• PersonTableDecorator.cfc
  • Creates a table representation of a Person by wrapping elements with <td>'s and the entire Person with <tr>

Links

Source Files

Wikipedia's Page on Decorators

Hal Helm's Decorator Article