Thoughts on Property Getters/Setters in ColdFusion

In ColdFusion 9, you can have ColdFusion automatically generate getters and setters for your properties by adding @accessors true to the component metadata. For example, the following two code snippets are practically identical.

component {
 public string function getFirstName() {
  return variables.firstName;
 }

 public void function setFirstName(required string firstName) {
  variables.firstName = arguments.firstName;
 }
}

/**
 * @accessors true
 */
component {
 property firstName;
}

Nice. That's a lot less code. Now what happens if you have a business rule where you always need the first name to be capitalized. I know it's not the best real world example, but it's straightforward. Simple enough, just override the generated getter by defining your own getFirstName method.

/**
 * @accessors true
 */
component {
 property firstName;
 
 public string function getFirstName() {
  return ucase(variables.firstName);
 }
}

Done. While that works and is the correct way of overriding the getter, it doesn't quite feel cohesive enough to me since the getter isn't visually tied directly to the property. I think it would be better if we were able to define the getters and setters as part of the property, similar to how other languages do it.

/**
 * @accessors true
 */
component {

 property firstName {
  get: function() {
   return ucase(variables.firstName);
  }
 }

}

Obviously this is just hypothetical syntax, but I think it reads a lot better.