So what?

Sometimes when presenting a really cool idea, you need someone in the audience to look at it from a business sense and ask if it really is better than what they do now. Forget about clean. Forget about elegant. Is it better?

This is what happened the other night at the NYCFUG. I was presenting on 3 methods of caching queries. The first method I mentioned was caching to a memory scope such as the application. I rejected this as being messy and having no control. Next was cachedwithin and cachedafter. These were rejected due to lack of control. Finally, I presented a small and elegant CFC for query caching inside a cached CFC. This looked great, was a clean and controled concept but the question was asked: "so what?".

Shlomy Gantz was genuinely interested in how this concept was better than caching directly to the application scope. Both stored the data in the same place. Both allowed for fine control over the cached data. Both were cleaner than the native caching in CFQUERY. What was better other than it being cool and elegant.

My only response was that it organized all the queries under a central authority and bundled all of the methods to act on the queries into one place. This was not enough for Shlomy who is using application based queries in a number of places.

This is an important concept. For him, the cached CFC was not enough to change what he was doing. It didn't give enough advantage to alter a tried and true business concept. For others who are not caching their queries, it may be.

Bottom line is to cache queries and know what the best method of caching the query is. Maybe if I added in the ability to do cachedwithin and cachedafter to the CFC it would look 'better' as a solution to those who are already doing something else. Maybe I need people like Shlomy to look at my solutions and ask the ever important question, "so what?".

Thanks Shlomy