What I Learned From Rails, Part I: Faker

One thing that people coming to Ruby on Rails are struck by is the rich ecosystem. It's similar to jQuery with many plugins. I thought it might be helpful to translate a few plugins into CFML. This first installment deals with generating fake data -- ideal for populating a database.

The Rails plugin is called "Faker" -- and it itself is a port from Perl. I've implemented it using custom tags:

city email first_name full_name last_name last-name_first phone state zipcode

Calling any of those will provide a randomized, plausible value.

The files are available at: http://github.com/halhelms/Faker-for-CFML