String Concatenation optimization

String concatenation is one of the most common, but, a pretty expensive operation. It can hit the performance severly if not used correctly. The performance goes down drastically if you append strings using '&' OR ListAppend() in a loop. I have seen application performance improving by 50-100% just by optimizing String concatenation (though that depends on how much concatenation is used in the app). So what do you about it?
The simplest and the most optimized way to do these append operations is using java's StringBuffer. (I am sure you must be aware of it but still.. :)) .
The code would look like

<cfset sb = createObject("java", "java.lang.StringBuffer")>
<cfloop from=1 to=100 index=i>
  <cfset sb.append("something")>
  <cfset sb.append(i)>
</cfloop>
<cfset result=sb.toString()>

Sometimes I feel that we should have a datastructure like this in ColdFusion directly but again I think whats wrong with using StringBuffer? Its like any other function which we would create. Isn't it so?

If you are a puristic and don't want to use any java API inside your CF app, there is another simple way to do the same thing. It uses ColdFusion Array to do the same thing what StringBuffer does. Instead of appending the string in the buffer, you can append to the array using ArrayAppend() and then once you are done and want to get the string back, use ArrayToList() with empty string ("") as delimiter. The code would look like

<cfset arr = ArrayNew(1)>
<cfloop from=1 to=100 index=i>
  <cfset ArrayAppend(arr, "something")>
  <cfset ArrayAppend(arr, i)>
</cfloop>
<cfset result=ArrayToList(arr,"")>

This would give a much better performance as compared to concatenation using '&' or using ListAppend() but will have lower performance as compared to StringBuffer. That is because of the overhead of Array object creation and array append operation. ArrayToList() will anyway create the string buffer and append the strings

You should use '&' or ListAppend() only when there are only 2-3 strings to be concatenated. Otherwise always use either of the two techniques above.

Optimizations with literals

Look at these two pieces of code carefully. Is there any difference between these two apart from the fact that the second one is shorter?

<cfset x = "sun,mercury,venus,earth,mars,jupiter,saturn,uranus,pluto,neptune">
<cfset y = ListSort(x,"text")>

and

<cfset y = ListSort("sun,mercury,venus,earth,mars,jupiter,saturn,uranus,pluto,neptune","text")>

If you think there is not much, read on.

There is a huge difference between these two piece of code - in terms of performance. The second one will have much better performance as compared to the first one. How?? Because the ListSort() method in the second case will not even be executed in the page request. Still scratching your head?

It is because of the intelligence that is built into CFML compiler (really superb code written by Edwin Smith). During compilation, it analyzes all the code and wherever there is a literal or functions executing literals, it tries to optimize it. In the second piece here, it sees that ListSort method is being called on a literal and it can be done statically. So compiler will execute this call during compilation itself and set the sorted value on 'y'. During the page execution, only thing that will get executed will be an assignment. Smart.. isn't it? Even java compiler, which does quite a many compile time optimization for java source files, does not have this intelligence of executing calls at compile time :)

It is not only about 'ListSort'. This is true for most of those CF functions which can work on a literal and can return a literal.

Extend CF native Objects - Harnessing Java

Since Coldfusion native objects are java objects, you can harness the java APIs to extend the functionality of these objects. In this post we will take CF Array and see how we can use these APIs to get some cool functionalities from them.

ColdFusion array is actually an implementation of java list (java.util.List). So all the list methods are actually available for Array.
CF provides most of the list functionality using Array functions but there are few things possible with java list which you can not do directly with CF functions.

1. Merge : Lets say you create two arrays and you want to merge these two arrays to create one bigger array. There is no CF function to do this.
However You can call List.addAll() methods to do it.

Here is how it would look.

I am creating array this way just because it is easier and I don't have to write whole lot of code :)

<cfset y = ListToArray("rupesh,tom,damon,hemant,ashwin,ram,prank,sanjeev")>
<cfset z = ListToArray("dean,manju,jason,tim")>
<cfset y.addAll(z)>
<cfdump var="#y#">

2. Merge in middle : Lets say you want to add the second array somewhere in the middle of first array say after 4 elements. The code would look like

<cfset y = ListToArray("rupesh,tom,damon,hemant,ashwin,ram,prank,sanjeev")>
<cfset z = ListToArray("dean,manju,jason,tim")>
<cfset y.addAll(4, z)>
<cfdump var="#y#">

3. Search : I have heard people complaining that there is no find method in Array. Actually you had it all the time. Just that it was hidden :)
You can use List.Contains() or List.indexOf() methods to achieve that. Here is the code.

<cfset y = ListToArray("rupesh,tom,damon,hemant,ashwin,ram,prank,sanjeev")>
<cfoutput>Contains Hemant: #y.contains("hemant")#</cfoutput>
<cfoutput>Index of damon : #y.indexof("damon")#</cfoutput>

Please note that the java index starts at 0 where as CF index starts at 1. So the index here will be 2. You must also note that since java is case sensitive, this search will also be case sensitive. To build case insensitiveness, you will have to make the list as well as the search in same case - either uppercase it or lowercase it.

4. Search whole array : You can also search if all the elements of one array are present in another array using containsAll() method of java list.

<cfset y = ListToArray("rupesh,tom,damon,hemant,ashwin,ram,prank,sanjeev")>
<cfset z = ListToArray("ram,prank,rupesh")>

<cfoutput> y Contains z: #y.containsAll(z)#</cfoutput>

5. Equality check : You can find out if two arrays are same or not using list's equals method.

<cfset y = ListToArray("rupesh,tom,damon,hemant,ashwin,ram,prank,sanjeev")>
<cfset z = ListToArray("dean, manju,jason,tim")>
<cfset x = ListToArray("rupesh,tom,damon,hemant,ashwin,ram,prank,sanjeev")>
<cfoutput>x equals y : #x.equals(y)#</cfoutput>
<cfoutput>x equals z : #x.equals(z)#</cfoutput>

6. RemoveAll : You can remove all the elements of one array from the second array using removeAll()

<cfset y = ListToArray("rupesh,tom,damon,hemant,ashwin,ram,prank,sanjeev")>
before removal <cfdump var="#y#">

<cfset z = ListToArray("ram,prank,tom")>
<cfset y.removeAll(z)>
After removal <cfdump var="#y#">

Go ahead and play around with it!