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CFEclipse and Eclipse Tips and Tricks

Mon, 21 May 2007 09:45:30 GMT

I've been working off, and mostly on, with CFEclipse over the past two years. In the last week or so, though, I've found three cool new (to me) shortcuts and thought I would share them.

"Firefox like Find"

In the Find dialog click the Incremental option and Eclipse will do a Firefox like Find, searching as you type, of the currently open file. I love the way Firefox searches and the added bonus in CFEclipse is that it will expand collapsed code as this screen shot shows:

Removing Comments

Adding comments in CFEclipse is easy, either (Ctrl/Command-Shift-M) or click on the comment icon, and if text is selected the comment will surround it. Removing comments can be done the same way, either select the whole comment or place the cursor to the left of the open comment and either (Ctrl/Command-Shift-M) or click on the comment icon.

Go to Line

Ctrl/Command-L brings up a dialog asking which line you would like to go to. Very useful when debugging an error and you know the line the error occurs on.

What keyboard shortcuts do you use?

A Week With CF Frameworks Explorer

Mon, 14 May 2007 12:02:03 GMT

I have been using the CF Frameworks Explorer, an Eclipse plugin that helps navigate framework configuration files, for a week now. While it is still in alpha stage, I have found it to be very helpful and bug-free.

Installation was straightforward by using the software update in Eclipse (Help > Software Update > Find & Install > Search for Updates of the currently installed features > Finish. Then follow prompts to update for all CFEclipse features including an extras folder.) Once Eclipse restarts go to Window > Show View > Other > CF Framework and the CF Framework Explorer will appear in the middle bottom panel. From there you can drag it wherever you like.

Once running the CF Frameworks Explorer provides a visual way to navigate your configuration files with icons, collapsible sections and color coding. I use XMLBuddy to edit XML files and while this provides auto-completion it does not have any code coloring other than turning it all blue. This makes navigating a large Mach-II file rather difficult. Not so with the CF Frameworks plugin as you can see from the picture below. When you click on a element it will open the configuration file, highlight the relevant section and adjust the scrollbars so it appears in the middle-ish of your screen.

(My7MachBlog is the name of the project as defined in Eclipse). By default I believe CFEclipse will find your configuration files and folders. I add a cfm extension to both Mach-II and ColdSpring configuration xml files so had to register the configuration files by right clicking on them > CF Frameworks > Set/Unset as Configuration File. For more on the features watch the screencast by Mark Drew in CFEclipse TV.

After one week I can strongly recommend adding CF Frameworks Explorer, indeed, I find myself using it so much that I wish that in addition to opening up the XML file it could open up the actual file. Many thanks to Mark Drew for this excellent addition to CFEclipse.

Other related links; Mark Drew will be presenting to the CF Frameworks workshop on Thursday, May 17th at 2pm (EST), there is a CF Frameworks screencast on CFEclipse TV and there is a campaign underway to make Mark Drew rich or at least compensate him for his work on CFEclipse.

The First Post

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:59:53 GMT

The first post. I've decided to start a blog primarily because I like writing. And having been a programmer for the last 10 years I haven't written much during that time. I also realize I like writing about technical issues and have a fair amount on my mind at the moment so it seems like a good time to start a blog. Note, I did not say I was a grammatically correct writer. So, expect the odd typo and grammatically incorrect sentence from time to time. This is a blog and I'm not going to use the grammar corrector in Word before posting.

I am also intrigued by social networking so InstantSpot seemed a good spot (pun intended) to start my blog.

I aim to cover a bunch of topics, some tutorials and explanations of basic ColdFusion functionality, thoughts on the future of the web and ColdFusion, conferences, and anything else that comes up. I will mostly be focusing on ColdFusion (and will probably start using cf as an abbreviation real soon) though I do hope to post on other non-cf topics like JavaScript, MySQL and databases in general and who knows what else in the future.

I am not going to aim to publish on a regular basis and have pledged to keep this blog a purely non-work time activity. I'm busy enough there anyway. Good busy. I also don't believe blogs die. So if I have nothing good or interesting to say I will say nothing. I also don't think this will turn into a news blog with short entries and links to the latest news. There are enough of those, and, I rely on them for my tech-news as much as anywhere else. In short, if you like what you are reading I suggest using the RSS feeds or subscribing over email.

More to come...