Is CFEclipse Dead?

This question has started to raise its head amongst various forums and I have been asked (and misquoted) that the CFEclipse Project will be discontinued now that "Bolt" has been announced. 

I just want to clarify to everyone that this is not the case. I am absolutely looking forward to Bolt being released. It is a great step forwards for CFML developers out there. But what will happen to the CFEclipse project?

Bear in mind that CFEclipse isn't just an editor. There are other features that I personally (ok I built them, I should like them) like such as the CFUnit tests, the Frameworks Explorer, Snipex and Snippets and the Dictionary view. These plugins are part of the CFEclipse project but they can be used standalone with a bit of coding. 

Also, think about how hard it is to get some developers to change their IDE. At the moment Bolt is in production and I am sure when it is released people will find some "quirks" that they are not used to and complain and switch back. Sometimes it requires a crowbar to separate a coder from their IDE. 

Regardless, the CFEclipse project (and even the editor) will keep on going, at least it means that we will have choice. Homesite, Dreamweaver, CFEclipse and Bolt (and others like TextMate etc). 

As with any ecosystem, they can live together, and be as individual as the developers that use them. CFEclipse will evolve and keep on going. 

I salute the CF Team as they have (from opinions of people at MAX) produced an IDE that is obviously wowing the crowds! And who knows, I might even submit bug fixes to Bolt given the chance ;) 

17 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 3:04 AM - Categories: cfeclipse | coldfusion | bolt

Getting my Groovy on. Beginning Groovy and Grails: Day 1

I decided that since it's now hit winter, and the nights close in so early, that I should spend one hour each evening learning about something. Since Ray seems to be getting into Groovy I thought to myself that I might be good with CF and ok with Java, I really needed to learn some other technologies. This helps me get my thinking hat on even when I am coding in CF. Revitalize the old noodle so to speak.

Now, if have heard of Groovy you might say "But it's just like Java". Well, yes and no. I think Groovy is closer to ColdFusion in its dynamic/runtime approach than it is on Java. I do think that sometimes we are looking too much at the Java world and copying a lot of the OO ideas without thinking about how a dynamic language might solve that. Hence this little foray into learning a new language!

Just so you know, I am working from the book "Beginnning Groovy and Grails" by Judd, Nusariat and Shingler.

So, what is Groovy? well from reading the book it seems that the Java Developers of the world were jealous of the productivity gained from the dynamic language developers (such as Ruby and PHP) and wanted a way to join those kids whilst maintaining backwards compatibility. Sure, there is more in the book, but go buy it and read it yourselves ;) so along was developed Groovy. The language sits on top of the JVM the same way that java does and in fact, I learned that you can copy and paste your complete Java code into a .groovy file and it will run with no problems!

 The syntax is much cleaner too, compared to java, compare the following examples (to just get a class created):

Java:

package uk.co.markdrew.testings;
public class Todo{
   private String name;
   private String note;
   
   public Todo(){}
   
   public Todo(String name, String note){
      this.name = name;
      this.note = note;
   }
   
   //imagine the getters and setters, another 12 lines of code which I cant be bothered to write
}

Groovy: public class Todo{
   String name;
   String note;
}

Right... that is about it... the groovy class already has a constructor, and the variables can be accessed either directly or through what seems to be auto generated getters and setters. YAY for less code!

So, how I got started? Well I downloaded the cross platform installer from the Groovy website

Running through that it then asks you to add GROOVY to your environment variables and GROOVY/bin to your PATH variable, if you are on OS X you can do it as detailed here

Once I did that, I was able to go to the terminal and type "groovy" and it picked it up and everything was super duper cool!

Then I went to get the TextMate bundles since I prefer learning a new language as simply as possible without needing to drop down into an IDE (learn the basics then you need the power of an IDE)

My first program was to make a Todos.groovy file with the following:

public class Todo {
      String name
      String note
   }
   def todos = [
      new   Todo(name:"1", note:"one"),
      new Todo(name:"2", note:"two"),
      new Todo(name:"3", note:"three")
   ]
   todos.each {
      println   "${it.name} ${it.note}"
   }

That's nice right? nice and neat! I then learned about loops, Sets, Maps, Lists and string concatenation which you can see in the line (println "${it.name} ${it.note}") above. Well, that is it so far, I am continuing to read the book and will move onto regular expressions (the bane of my life) tonight!

4 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 3:00 AM - Categories: groovy

Join me @ ColdFusionCamp 2008 in Munich

In a couple of weeks, the German ColdFusion User Group is holding ColdFusion Camp 2008 in Munich. This is a great mini conference with some great sessions covering frameworks, tuning, PDF generation and Railo Extensions. All this for a mere €35 (£28, $45)! 

I shall be covering the ModelGlue and Reactor camps for the framework battle against Coldbox (a fight to the death!). Andy Allan will also be presenting as well as Gert Franz, Louis Mojano, Darren Pywell and Peter Haak covering Security Awareness.

Apart from the main conference itself, there will be a day of training sessions (priced separately) covering Advanced ColdFusion, ColdBox, Subversion and Railo. Gert and I shall even be building a YouTube clone in a session! Not to be missed! 

I think this will be the way ahead for a lot of conferences, as the organisers of "A Wee Dram" have mentioned, lower prices, shorter conferences, more locations. Get the power of ColdFusion out to the masses!

5 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 3:08 AM - Categories: CFConferences | ColdFusionCamp

Finally! episode 1 of the cf doc's podcast now live!

3 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 3:14 AM - Categories: podcast | coldfusion | ukcfug |

Live Tonight! The CF Doctors are in the house!

0 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 8:18 AM - Categories: coldfusion | ukcfug |

The UKCFUG is Back!

2 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 3:27 AM - Categories: coldfusion | max | ukcfug | podcasting |

The oddest CF error/strangeness I have spotted

0 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 3:08 AM - Categories: model-glue | model-glue | coldfusion |