Implicit Getters and Setters

While the addition of implicit getters and setters for properties in ColdFusion is really nice, I'm still a little jealous of the how they're handled in Groovy.

Take the typical User object.

<cfcomponent name="User">

    <cfproperty name="firstName" />
    <cfproperty name="lastName" />

</cfcomponent>

In ColdFusion, you would interact with this object like such:

<cfset user = new User() />
<cfset user.setFirstName("Tony") />
<cfset user.setLastName("Nelson") />

<cfoutput>
Hello, my name is #user.getFirstName()# #user.getLastName()#
</cfoutput>

Pretty basic. Now how would that look if ColdFusion had implicit getters and setters like Groovy:

<cfset user = new User() />
<cfset user.firstName = "Tony" />
<cfset user.lastName = "Nelson" />

<cfoutput>
Hello, my name is #user.firstName# #user.lastName#
</cfoutput>

Much cleaner. Now before you say it's just accessing the properties directly (as if they were stored in the this scope), there's more to it than that. When you're accessing the property, the call is still being routed through the implicit getters and setters. This means you can still add your own custom logic to the properties by overriding their methods.

To demonstrate, let's add a 3rd property to the User component, fullName, and add our own getter.

<cfcomponent name="User">

    <cfproperty name="firstName" />
    <cfproperty name="lastName" />
    <cfproperty name="fullName" />

    <cffunction name="getFullName">
        <cfreturn getFirstName() & " " & getLastName() />
    </cffunction>

</cfcomponent>

Now let's update our code:

<cfset user = new User() />
<cfset user.firstName = "Tony" />
<cfset user.lastName = "Nelson" />

<cfoutput>
Hello, my name is #user.fullName#
</cfoutput>

Even though it looks like we're accessing the fullName property directly, it will still be routed through getFullName(), which should output "Tony Nelson".

I've gone back and forth on whether or not this is a good thing. On one hand, you're calling a method even though it doesn't look like it. On the other, it's a lot cleaner. Some people may argue that access to properties should remain hidden behind Accessors (getters) and Mutators (setters), but in truth they still are.

Besides, if our goal is to have rich business objects that have both properties and behavior, shouldn't we be able to treat the properties like they were just simply properties and nothing more? To me, having a getter implies there's some additional behavior required in order to retrieve a property, which in most cases there isn't. What are we really gaining by masking the call to a property behind a method?