Not in code

The latest version of Macromedia’s ColdFusion is out! I think it’s even been released on schedule! Great work MM.

http://www.macromedia.com/software/coldfusion/

Your choice of font can have a significant impact on the screen real estate that you’re left with when you’re programming, especially if you don’t have a monitor and video adapter that support a high resolution. The reason that the font is so important is that some fonts are more readable than others while taking the same amount or even less physical screen space. On the reccomendation of a colleague(thanks Neale) I’ve just switched to a font from www.proggyfonts.com. I now use proggy square (TTF & slashed zero) at font size 12. This gives me 77 lines in eclipse at 1280 x 1024 compared with the 55 lines using courier new at size 10 that I used to get. All, this without in my opinion anyway, increasing the strain on my eyes or reducing readability - very cool.

I’ve finally been invited to participate in the Blackstone Beta program! For those of you who may not already know this, Blackstone is the codename given to the next version of Coldfusion, i.e. Coldfusion 7. It’s due for official release sometime next year, but the Beta has been made available to those people who might be interested in having a play with it before the final release and maybe in the process picking up some bugs that Macromedia’s internal QA may have missed.

First impressions? I’ve only just downloaded the installer so it’s too early for me to comment but reading the feature list & some reviews, it seems as though this new version is going to be verrry cool. Respected CF’ers like Ben Forta and Ray Camden have already blogged about Blackstone in recent times. Ofcourse foolasagoog also has a few interesting posts about it.

I can’t wait to have a play with it for myself and see how it copes with my existing CFMX code. I also can’t wait to play with some of the new features (and there are a fair few!). I’m particularly interested in it’s increased support for Java/J2EE support, amongst other things in Blackstone, you can package a Coldfusion App as a WAR or EAR without distributing the CFML source. Coming from a strong Java background myself, I’m particulary interesting in learning more about the benefits using CF in a J2EE application.

You can read more about Blackstone at the blogs that I mentioned earlier as well at the official Macromedia Blackstone pages. If you’re already used Blackstone please feel free to post your impressions as a comment below.

Finally, for those on dialup planning to download Blackstone be warned, at 230MB+ it’s a much bigger file than the Coldfusion MX installer - Enjoy!

This is my third post about CFEclipse and I’m happy to say that things only get’s better. I’m not going to describe the changes in too much detail because this post by Mark Mandel does a pretty good job.

The CFEclipse team appear to have used the icon () that Mark contributed in their updated release (1.1.14, Mark reviewed 1.1.13). I’m not sure what the differences are between 1.1.13 and 1.1.14 are because the release notes for 1.1.14 don’t seem to be out yet (the link points to the old notes).

I’m happy coz they’ve fixed the code completion bug that I whined about in my earlier post. Other niceties include more preference settings and they’ve also made CFEclipse a top level item in the preferences tree so that it’s easier to find. I haven’t had a chance to play with any of the other features yet so you’ll have to read the 1.1.14 release notes when they’re out or read the 1.1.13 release notes.

If I have anything more to add I’ll post another message once I’ve had a chance to play with it a bit more.

It’s been about a week since I started using Eclipse for my all of Coldfusion development at work, so I figured that it’s about time I post an update on my original post about this.

Overall my experience has been very pleasant to say the least. The installation procedure was very straightforward and took about 20 minutes in total, including the installation of any additional plugins but not including download time. The actual installation procedure is already described at several other sites so I won’t describe it here.

Currently, my Eclipse environment consists of:

• Eclipse SDK 3.0 (with all the default plugins)
• CFEclipse 1.1.9 (currently an unstable release but very good)
• Snips 1.1.8 for CFEclipse (very good)
• XMLBuddy 2.0.10 (ordinary)
• CSSEditor 0.0.4 (Not yet tested)
• JFaceDB 2.2.1 (Not yet tested)

The syntax highlighting for CFEclipse is excellent and pretty much exactly the same as Dreamweaver MX 2004. Eclipse also “appears” a lot quicker to load up and use than Dreamweaver MX 2004 on my PC at work, an Athlon 2600+ with 512MB of RAM. The snips file for CFEclipse seems very comprehensive without any visible performance penalties. My only complaint so far has been that I need to type “Ctrl+Space” to get the auto completion to work most of the time. I don’t know why this is yet and it may just be a configuration thing (read user error) I’ve read recently that this is a bug that will be fixed in the next version of CFEclipse. It’s not a huge drawback anyway and may even be a good thing because it’s a feature that could get annoying after a while.

Another feature that I love is the “Tasks” feature. This is built into Eclipse and is not specific to CFEclipse. I love the fact that you can attach tasks to specific line nos. It would be even cooler if it would automatically create a task for “TODO” comments. Being able to categorise tasks would also be useful, but hey, it’s still pretty useful as it is.

Right next to the “Tasks” tab is a “Problems” tab part of CFEclipse which highlights errors in the files that you have recently worked with. An example of a problem might be a <cfif> tag without a closing tag. This is really a superb feature, if only it worked correctly. It does not appear to handle nested comments very well and sometimes reports problems in code that has been commented out and also comes up with errors that are not really errors (e.g. name is a required attribute for <cfmodule>, this is not true). Bummer. I’ve read recently that this is a new feature that will be developed further in a subsequent release if CFEclipse

Finally, I’ve left the best feature for last – The outline view. Some of you may have com accross ouline views in various XML editors. The XML is displayed in a tree like outline whose branches can be expanded and collapsed allowing you to quickly navigate to a particular spot in your code. CFEclipse 1.1.9 does this for Coldfusion – verrrry handy. It even displays various common tags using different icons (so it’s easy to spot a stray for instance). This really is an excellent feature and probably deserves a screenshot. I’ll try and post a few soon.

Actually I lied. The best feature of CFEclipse might be the outline view, but the best feature of Eclipse itself is definitely the browser likr “back button”. I LOVE this feature and I think that anyone who has accidently hit “Ctrl + W” instead of “Ctrl + S” will as well. It takes you back to to the most recent spot that you were working on, even reopening the file and repositioning the cursor if the file is not open anymore.

Wow – this is turning out to be a really long post. I think I’m gonna end today’s update there and leave you with this link to a comparison of CFEclipse and HE3 a commercial CFMX plugin for Eclipse at Sean Corfield’s blog.

Finally, something I really should have said when I origingally posted this, congratulations to the CFEclipse team on an excellent job

Some of you might be fortunate enough to be attending the Sun Developer Day this wednesday. It looks like I won’t be able to go because I’ve already taken a whole heap of time off from work for assignments and exams. I’m still pushing management to let me go because the agenda looks pretty interesting.

I’ve been working with Coldfusion in recent times and haven’t used Java in a while. I was really looking forward to using the Developer day to reaquaint myself with some of the happenings in the Java world, especially the changes in 1.5.

It looks I might just get my chance to work with J2EE again considering that Coldfusion MX is build on JRun and offers quite a few ways of leveraging it’s relationship with Java. Maybe I’ll write a piece on this after I get a chance to do some experimenting.

I hope that I can still make it, maybe with some luck (and a miracle?) management will change their mind…