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

Question

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 maintainable, 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

Answer 1

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!

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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?