Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

One of the most requested features in CFEclipse is to have insight into CFC's to have method completion. I thought I would detail some of the problems that are involved in this task from an editor. I am putting this together so that when people ask me why not, I can point them to this, and of course, if they come up with some good answers, they can post them here! 1) What CFC are we calling? The simplest way to call a CFC is to do the following: <cfinvoke component="uk.co.markdrew.MyCompnent" returnvariable="myComp"> Now, at runtime, ColdFusion would figure out where "uk.co.markdrew.MyComponent" is located, this could be either by doing mappings in ColdFusion or in fact, by VirtualDirectories in Apache/IIS. This is pretty hard in CFEclipse unless we add a "uk/co/markdrew/MyCompnent.cfc in your project. If you had a separate directory, lets say you keep your components in /Project/components/uk/co/markdrew/MyComponent.cfc", it would be hard. Not impossible, since we can add linked folders and a feature I have been working on is to be able to mark a folder as a mapping, but pretty hard for all the different cases and layouts that people will have 2) A CFC location from a variable Since you can pass variables to tags, you could pass the CFC as a variable, for example: <cfinvoke component="#APPLICATION.MyComponent#" returnvariable="myComp"> In this case, and similar cases, it would be VERY hard to find out what myComp actually is! If the "APPLICATION.MyComponent" is set in Application.cfc for example or anywhere else (in the many different ways of setting an application variable, that I am not even going to go into here!) it would be impossible to find out what myComp is. 3) What is the returned object? The above code is probably something you wont do a lot, but how about something like: <cfinvoke component="uk.co.markdrew.MyCompnent" method="getObject" returnvariable="myComp"> And the function is defined as: <cffunction name="getObject" returntype="Any">
   <!--- Losts of complicated ways of getting an object, like looking it up in a database --->
   <cfreturn someObject>
</cffunction> How would the editor know what the object, and thus what funtions it had, is? This is very much like what happens in ColdSpring so unless we write CFEclipse so it actually does everything a CF server does (and even then, that is dangerous at runtime!) it wont be able to know what is happening! So, how would you get round these problems? (put aside that its in Eclipse, try writing a parser in CF that just reads text files and let me know how you get on!)

I am showing mine, how would you show yours? Or maybe your dedication to your chosen bit of technology? Answers on a postcard (or tattoo'd on your flesh)...

So, I am going to be presenting at few conferences this year (more on that soon!) and I wanted to get some community feedback about what you would like to hear about and even get demo's on. I have a few things I want to demonstrate but I am sure people out there have questions along the lines of "how do I..." or know of features that thing would be of use to people out there. So, an open source presentation?? Maybe not but I would welcome your ideas/feedback!

As I am sure a lot of people have noticed, I have been rather quiet on the CFEclipse development front. Well, I am now going to re-start the development of it, and wondered if people (that maybe read this blog) have any features they would really like to see in the next version. This is a call to feedback for features, that is not bugs (so please dont put "I would really like to see the feature of not having a bug when... xyz" So its over to you, I have a few features that are coming up, mainly some spring cleaning and changes to the UI. Thanks for the feedback in advance!

I just wanted to post a note that this morning I did a release of CFEclipse 1.3.1.6. This is a bug-fix release, and has no extra features and is geared at some specific bugs:

• 332 (File Explorer Doesn't Show Sub-Folders after upgrading to 1.3.1.5)
• 368 (Passive FTP is not enabled)
• CFEclipse has now been compiled to comply with Java 1.4 (so if you are getting odd errors about major minor versions this should do the trick)

Its a very small release but people have been complaining about the FileExplorer so I thought I would get this version out. There are no other changes, so if these issues do not affect you, you do not need to upgrade.

Jim Priest has had a a fantastic article on CFEclipse and ColdFusion Development using Eclipse published over at IBM Developer Works, It is definitely worth a read! Read it here By the way, Jim does a *LOT* of work on the CFEclipse Wiki and Trac site, keeping it up to date and he is also is the guardian at the door, keeping the little spammers at bay, so a big thanks for all his work!

It has been a while since I blogged, basically I have been so busy I forget to breathe sometimes. Anyway, the good news is that I am heading to Adobe MAX Europe in Barcelona on Sunday! I think this is going to be an awesome conference, one that I am very much looking forward to, especially since I am a MAX virgin! Apart from trying to attend as many presentations as possible on Flex and AJAX, I shall (surprise! surprise!) also be a speaker! My presentation is on using Eclipse for ColdFusion development, which is a slightly different take on my usual presentation (ok, ok, you caught me, I will be mentioning CFEclipse) as it will cover a lot more ground that I usually do! One of the important decisions that I have left now is whether I shall be doing the presentation in English or in Spanish, not sure what the rule is here? When in Rome?...

I just wanted to note down some public SnipEx server addresses that are out there just to remind myself as well as hopefully helping others:

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Hello, yes, I am back, from outer space, well, not exactly. I have taken a month or so away from development of CFEclipse and my other projects (including this blog!) which has been great. Of course one of the reasons for this has been that I have been very busy at work, and that kind of takes it out of you. This is normal for me, but the work has been rather oppressive rather than creative so my brain needed a bit of space. Some news: I shall be speaking at Adobe MAX in Barcelona in October! I am very excited about this as I shall be demonstrating not only CFEclipse but the ColdFusion Extensions for CF8 (something I love using by the way) as well as hopefully the debugging capabilities that you now have with CF8. With regards to CFEclipse, I am currently taking a bit of a hard look at features and fixes that will make it into the next version. I am working on a complete re-design of the interface, basically following the rule of making actions available (no more hidden menus etc) so that access stuff easier. Apart from that, I am looking at re-compiling and coding the plugin so its compatible with Java 1.4.x since, even though I much prefer Java 5, it seems that is the most common error that people are getting (by looking at the Trac bugs!) On a final side-note: I have started a course each week in Film Directing! I did my first class last night and its absolutely awesome! We read a number of screenplays (Thelma and Louise and Brazil being the main ones) and dissected them to get a feel for the responsibility of a Director with regards to examining and expanding on the ideas within a script. Don't worry tho, Hollywood is still safe (after all, I only have done one class so far!) Well, that is it for the moment, I hear there has been lots of exciting news in the community whilst I have been away (I havent been reading blogs or news) but I just like to state that I took this vacation away from development without consulting the ColdFusion Weekly guys, it seems they have started up again after the summer!

Last week I was delighted to be invited to do a presentation to the Cleveland CFUG. The presentation was about CFEclipse and luckily enough they recoreded the Adobe Connecto (still cant get used to that name... I didnt mind Breezo, but Connecto??) which, if you are interested, you can check out here: http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/p51917266/