I’m investigating some basic, everyday operations that many web application developers face. Using very simple test cases, I’m determining if there is a time savings by writing Java code and calling it from ColdFusion. If there is a savings, is it worth the extra coding time and overhead* for using Java. Here’s the result of my first, basic test.
File Read/Write Operations
I was actually surprised how much faster invoking a Java I/O class was than the equivalent code in ColdFusion. Using only a 90k byte file, I wrote a Java class to read it, parse it on a delimiter of the pattern ‘x\s’ and output each line.
public String outputScannedFile() throws IOException
{
Scanner s = null;
String output = "";
try {
s = new Scanner(new BufferedReader(new FileReader("C:\\inputfile\\xanadu.txt")));
s.useDelimiter("x\\s*");
while (s.hasNext()) {
output += s.next();
}
} finally {
if (s != null) s.close();
}
return output;
}This is executed by creating an instance of a class and invoking a method (I use cfscript for Java objects… easier to read)
<cfscript>
output = createobject("java", "orbwave.StringTest");
</cfscript>
<cfdump var="#output.outputScannedFile()#">This executed at a good pace.
| Total Time | Avg Time | Count | Template |
| 3078 ms | 3078 ms | 1 | C:\jboss-4.0.4\server\default\.\deploy\brownlees.war\scribble.cfm |
The equivalent code in ColdFusion is much easier to write
<cffile action="read" file="C:\\inputfile\\xanadu.txt" variable="input">
<cfloop from="1" to="#ListLen(input,'x')#" index="span">
<cfoutput>#ListGetAt(input,span,'x')#</cfoutput>
</cfloop>It also took over twice as long to execute.
| Total Time | Avg Time | Count | Template |
| 7484 ms | 7484 ms | 1 | C:\jboss-4.0.4\server\default\.\deploy\brownlees.war\scribble.cfm |
As one would expect, using Java to handle the I/O is faster. However, I did not expect the compilation and execution of a simple set of ColdFusion commands to take over 4 seconds longer on such a basic operation.
Is It Worth It?
In situations where you’re performing a significant amount of file I/O, I would suggest writing some simple Java classes, compressing them to a JAR and installing it on your app server.
* By overhead, I’m not talking about system resource overhead, but the additional resources needed to maintain Java in addition to ColdFusion, such as source control measures, training (if necessary), compile-time and build-time.
