What step would u take to refactor a ball of mud CF app into something modern and maintainable

I am going to pick up a task that no one has ever attempted to try at my workplace. It is a CF app first written using CF 2.0 (Yes, 2.0!) 10 yrs ago with > 10 cfscheduler tasks.. We explored the idea of rewriting the app, but 10 yrs of work simply can't be rewrote in 2-3 months.

What steps shall one take to modernize the app into a maintainab开发者_如何转开发le, extendable state? The one that I keep hearing is "write tests", but how can I write tests when it wasn't even in MVC?

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks!

p.s. I should thank Allaire, Macromedia and Adobe for keeping CF so freaking backward compatible all the way back to 2.0!

btw, what's the most modern, maintainable state for a CF app without MVC framework? or should my end goal be ultimately refactoring it into a MVC app?? I can't image how many links I will break if I do... seems impossible... thought?

update: found 2 related Q's...

• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6395/how-do-you-dive-into-large-code-bases
• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/29788/how-do-you-dive-into-a-big-ball-of-mud

I am not sure if you need to move the whole site to a MVC application. Recently I did helped with an site that was not MVC, that still had a library with the Models, Services and Assemblers in a clean and organized manor. It worked great, and we didn't need to do anything more than what was necessary.

That being said, my first step would be to organize the spaghetti code into their different purposes. It may be hard to properly create the models, but at the very least you could break out the services like functions from the pages. With that done, it should be a lot cleaner already.

Then, I would try to take the repeated code and put them into custom tags. It will make the code more reusable, and easier to read.

Good Luck!

Consider, whether a full fledged framework is really necessary. In its most basic form a framework is merely highly organized code. So if procedural, that is well organized, works leave it.

Keep in mind something like FW/1 as migration path can be better than say Coldbox if you don't need all the other stuff.

Lastly, consider this I was able to migrate a 4.5 almost 70% of the way to Coldbox (very simple and really more about directory and file organization versus IOC, plugins, modules, etc...) just using a few extra lines per file plus onMissingMethod functions.

Good Luck.

I had to deal with a similar situation for about two years at my last job, however, it wasn't quite as old as yours. I think I was dealing with code from 4.0 on. There's no silver bullet here, and you'll need to be careful that you don't get too caught up in re-factoring the code and costing your company tons of money in the process. If the app works as it is rewriting it would be a pretty big wast of money.

What I did was update small chunks at a time, I wouldn't even refactor whole templates at a time, just small portions of one at a time. If I saw a particular ugly loop, or nested if statements I'd try to clean it up the best I could. If the app can be broken down into smaller modules or areas of functionality and you have the extra time you can try to clean up the code a module at a time.

A good practice I heard from the Hearding Code podcast is create a testing harness template that would use a particular cfm page that has a known output that you can re-run to make sure that it still has the same output once you've done refactoring. Its not nearly as granular as a unit test, but its something and something is almost always better than nothing, right?

I suspect that the reason this app hasn't been touched for years is because for the most part it works. So the old adage "if it ain't broken don't fix it" probably applies; However, code can always be improved :)

The first thing I'd do is switch to Application.cfc and add some good error logging. That way you may find out about things that need to be fixed, and also if you do make changes you're know if they break anything else.

The next thing I'd do is before you change any code is use selenium to create some tests - it can be used as a FireFox plugin and will record what you do. It's really good for testing legacy apps without much work on your part.

Chances are that you won't have much if any protection from SQL injection attacks so you will want to add cfqueryparam to everything!!

After that I'd be looking for duplicated code - eliminating duplicate code is going to make maintenance easier.

Good luck!

Funnily enough, I'm currently involved in converting an old CF app into an MVC3 application. Now this isn't CF2, it was updated as recently as a year ago so all of this may not apply at all to your scenario, apologies if this is the case.

The main thing I had to do consolidate the mixed up CFQuerys and their calls into logical units of code that I could then start porting in functionality either to C# or JavaScript.

Thankfully this was a very simple application, the majority of the logic was called on a database using the DWR Ajax library; that which wasn't was mostly consolidated in a functions.cfm file.

Obviously a lot of that behavior doesn't need to be replicated as packaging up the separate components of logic (such as they were) in the CF app did map quite neatly to the various Partial Views and Editor Templates that I envisaged in the MVC application.

After that, it was simply a case of, page by page, finding out which logic was called when, what it relied upon that then finally creating a series of UML class and sequence diagrams.

Honestly though, I think I gained the most ground when I simply hit File-New Project and started trying to replicate the behavior of the app from the top of index.cfm.

I would break logical parts of the app into CFC's

Pick a single view, look at the logic within. Move that out to a CFC and invoke it.

Keep doing that you will have something much easier to work with that can be plugged into an MVC later. Its almost no work to do this, just copy and paste sections of code and call them.

You can consider using object factory to layer your application. We have similar situation at work and we started refactoring by putting Lightwire DI framework.

First we migrated all the sql statement into gateways, then we started using services and take a lot of code out of the templates to the services.

The work is not finished yet but the application is looking better already.

For large, really complex applications I'd prefer ColdBox for a re-factor project. However, I just saw a presentation at the D2W Conference on F/W 1 (Framework One), a VERY simple ColdFusion MVC framework. Check out code from the presentation here.

It's 1 (one) CFC file and a set of conventions for organizing your code. I highly recommend evaluating it for your project.