Todd had an interesting question regarding the user of the server scope:

I was thinking that rather than invoking a common employee information cfc object into the application scope (with multiple other applications doing the same thing), it seemed like a good idea to just invoke it into the server scope.

Follow-up question: If this were done and an update was made to the employee.cfc, would that change get overwritten in server memory?

Interestingly enough - I can't honestly remember the last time I used the server scope. Maybe because a lot of (almost all of) my development is for applications, and not a complete "dot com", I tend to shy away from the scope as I never know who else may be rummaging around in there. Even if you plan on developing on your own box and serving on a box you own, I'd still be concerned about the possibility of having to share a box with others. (Of course, if the box uses multiple instances of ColdFusion, then it isn't really an issue.)

So at a basic level - I guess this makes sense. Again - if you are sure you are the only one on the box. CFC creation can be a bit slow, so if the multiple applications could all share the same resource, I could see that being helpful. Of course, you want to watch out for possible race conditions.

With this said though - I still feel uneasy about recommending this. Am I an old fuddy duddy or do others agree?

As for his follow up question, if server.foo was an instance of foo.cfc, and you edited foo.cfc, the server instance would not be updated. You would need to create a routine to create it again. Typically I add url "hooks" to my applications that force the recreation of Application-scoped CFCs. There is nothing preventing you from doing the same with server scoped variables.