Project X unveiled: Say a big hello to SnipEx

June 5, 2007 ·

At the CFEclipse presentation at Scotch on the Rocks last week, Project X was finally unveiled. SnipEx is a new server side project, written in CF which allows CFEclipse's Snippets View to get snippets from a remote server. The Server The SnipEx server is made up of a couple of CFC's as well as (currently) a MySQL server. The database interaction is pretty simple so this can be ported and modified to suit the needs of most people (such as adding notification and custom workflows). All the code behind it is in CFML so users should not have any problems adapting it to suit their needs both for internal snippet storage and for external display. The code for the SnipEx server will be released to the community this week on RiaForge. The Client The client is simply CFEclipse. You can subscribe to up to eight SnipEx servers including an upcoming CFEclipse.org hosted one and one hosted at CFLib.org (with a big thank you to Ray Camden) and you have the ability then to insert snippets from remote servers into your CFML documents as well as (if the server has been configured to do so) submit your own snippets to servers. A big thank you has to go out to Robert Blackburn, that apart from developing the CFUnit plugin has also developed the core of this feature. Also a big shout out to Andy Jarrett for the server side part of it! Finally, you might be wondering when this will be released? Well, it will have to be in a couple of days time, as it will be part of a bigger release. So hold on for the moment!

Tags: cfeclipse · coldfusion · snipex

10 responses

1 Kevin Penny // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:11 PM

Looks sweet Drew - I'm excited as I'm a huge snippet user.

I had a thought though - about utilizing googles new online/offline Gears gadgets with this type of storage for the snippet repository - not sure how it would work exactly, but would be very interesting - that way you can be connectionless etc, and have the snippet repo available - let me know if that's something do-able - would be an interesting avenue for sure.
2 Mark Drew // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:11 PM

@Kevin: They are already cached by CFEclipse, so no news for gears or Derby. I am working on overwriting them but when they are downloaded they are available for a long while :) (well a week, then it might check for updates)
3 Kevin Penny // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:11 PM

very cool - I can't wait to load it up -
4 Adrock // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

Why not support Apache Derby instead of or inaddition to mySQL so CF8 users don't have to install anything more to setup a snipEx server?

-Adam
5 Mark Drew // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

The SQL is so simple, that when I release the install scripts should be very easy to port! I havent checked in any server side code, so that is a definite!
6 Terrence P Ryan // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

That's awesome, Mark. Congrats on getting it out the door.
7 Mark Drew // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

Cheers man, of course, its not QUITE out of the door... a couple more days yet!
8 Duncan Loxton // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

Awesome - this will be great - and yet another reason I can spout at my developers to use cfeclipse over DW. This will be a fantastic addition to many peoples coding practices guys.
9 Tero Pikala // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

For some reason I never really got into creating proper snippet libraries; I guess I felt that they would be lost during next Windows reinstall anyway. I've yet to work for a company so nice that they would give me a Mac to work with so I usually end up reinstalling machine every 6-12 months.

This feature has nice potential changing way I will use snippets since they are nicely safe and they can be also shared!
10 Big Kev // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

Mark, I don't wanna see any more blog postings till this is out the door. Stop enticing us all and get it out already!!!! lol.

Great work mate, must be due to another wish list push on my Blog?

Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

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