I was having a conversation with another developer at work about using the new CF8 onMissingHandler method for components. The issue we were debating was that in Java, using the try/catch or basically error trapping should be slighly more expensive than without it and if in-fact the onMissingMethod was trapping missing method errors, then there should be a big overhead, so it would mean that depending on it would't be a good thing.

From what I understand, when ColdFusion compiles CFML code down to Java, each of the functions doesn't get rendered to a java method, but rather to an inner class, so the onMissingMethod is actually another inner class so there should be no overhead.

I did a bunch of tests (Here is the code on the measurement and reporting) and it looks like that onMissingMethod is totally safe to use (performance wise)!

Another great reason to use CF8!