Eclipse Quick Tip

I say that this is an Eclipse quick tip because it should be helpful to all. I mainly use CFEclipse & Flex Builder in the course of a workday and there is one thing that I can share with you. A friend of mine upgraded to Eclipse 3.4 last night and during a chat he said it seems to be a bit quicker, except on start up. I hear this a lot from CFE users and there is a pretty easy solution to this. Most of the time you start creating different projects and after awhile you can end up with 60 to 80 projects pretty quickly. If you leave all of the projects open shutdown and fire Eclipse up the next morning it needs to load all of these resources. A very easy fix is to close all unrelated projects. I only keep open the projects I am working on and when I am ready to switch it is very easy to close / close unrelated projects.

Eclipse 3.4 New Project Feature

After upgrading to the new Eclipse 3.4 Platform I am pretty excited about a couple new features. This one is more of a time saver for me and some may not care but I really like it. We have about 10 servers here that I do direct development on (no source control, I know...) and I need a good way to organize all of my projects. What I do is create working sets for each server eg dev1,live1 etc... When I create a new project there is now a feature to add this project to a working set which saves time from having to go in and edit the working sets. This is small but I am big fan of it!

Remove all lines using CFEclipse

If you have ever downloaded a text file or source code and just had way to many blank lines in it what did you do? Did you go through and delete all of the lines by hand? After you got tired of doing that did you try a find and replace of "\r\n"? After all those things do not work are you ready for the easiest solution ever? Open up your file in CFEclipse (it may be an Eclipse feature) and hit ctrl+f to open the find & replace dialog box. In the find input enter \r\n. Wait you said that would not work? I did say that, and that is because your normal editor does not allow for regular expressions. Check Regular Expressions in the options and hit replace. That is all there is to it, I mean really is there anything this IDE does not do? The example below is an ext file that is pretty large, but a pretty easy task with CFEclipse.

CFEclipse Upper / Lower Case

Here is a quick tip that I use on a daily basis that I can not live without. Highlight some text and simply use the keyboard shortcut ctrl+shif+U to transform the highlighted text into uppercase. To create lowercase text simply use ctrl+shift+L. Just another reason I love CFEclipse. If you have not tried it yet then go do it now by clicking http://www.cfeclipse.org.

Mark Drew CFEclipse Presentation

Last week at our CFUG meeting we were lucky enough to have Mark Drew present CFEclipse to us. Here is a quick blurb from my posting last week about the presentation and a link to the presentation is below.

Tonight's Meeting
We are pleased to have Mark Drew, the lead developer of the CFEclipse project, to present to us on CFEclipse.  Mark Drew will be presenting how to get to grip with the basics of CFEclipse, speeding up your development with Snippets and SnipEx and finally focusing on the CF frameworks explorer.

If you haven't taken a look at CFEclipse... I highly suggest that you do!  It's a free open source ColdFusion plugin for the Eclipse IDE. We will be recording this presentation and making it available either right after the meeting or first thing tomorrow morning.

http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/p51917266/

Cleveland CFUG 08/09/2007 - Mark Drew & CFEclipse

This is a reminder that we have our regular August meeting Thursday night at 6:30pm at Lodestone, located at 4500 Rockside Road, Suite 150, in Cleveland.

Tonight's Meeting
We are pleased to have Mark Drew, the lead developer of the CFEclipse project, to present to us on CFEclipse.  Mark Drew will be presenting how to get to grip with the basics of CFEclipse, speeding up your development with Snippets and SnipEx and finally focusing on the CF frameworks explorer.

If you haven't taken a look at CFEclipse... I highly suggest that you do!  It's a free open source ColdFusion plugin for the Eclipse IDE. We will be recording this presentation and making it available either right after the meeting or first thing tomorrow morning.

Bio
Mark has been programming Coldfusion since 1996, and even though he has had forays into Perl, ASP and PHP he is still loving every line of code he has crafted with ColdFusion, so much so that he decided to be part of the CFEclipse team and build an even better editor to write CF with. As a day job he is Product Manager at Design UK http://www.designuk.com, a London based agency providing ecommerce, content managament, CRM and creative marketing solutions to some of the rather more well known high street stores. Apart from this Mark
still has time to develop CFEclipse (http://www.cfeclipse.org) and blog about coldfusion and related subjects over at http://www.markdrew.co.uk/blog/. Mark is also co-manager of the UKCFUG http://www.ukcfug.org and has spoken on a number of subjects including ORMs, Frameworks and CFEclipse.

See you tonight!

Exporting Archived Files from Eclipse

Today I was working on a quick html site for a friend. After completing the changes I needed to make it was time to send the files off to my friend. Normally I would just pull up explorer, right click and zip the folder using WinZip. Today I stumbled on a better solution using Eclipse and I took some screen shots to share with you. First you just right click on your project and select export.

From the export dialog box select Archive File

Finally just select the files you want to export. The default is to select all but you may want to remove some source or build files so this step is nice. You are now ready to export just select a location to save it to,  set a couple of options and you are all done.

CFEclipse Quick Tip: Reloading Dictionaries

I had a chance to view the presentation on ColdBox by  Luis Majano that took place today and just a quick shout out, he did a wonderful job. While I was watching the presentation I learned something new about CFEclipse. Luis provides you with the dictionary files that give you the ColdBox framework code insight (very cool!). This tip will go for any dictionary that you need to add. After you add a dictionary file and add the custom configuration to the dictionaryconfig.xml document most people restart CFEclipse to let the dictionary changes to affect. I learned that you do not need to do this. You can reload the dictionaries by simpling using CTRL+F5 while editing a template. I thought this was a great little tip that I would share.

CFEclipse & Mapped Drives Problem Resolved

I have been using CFEclipse for around a year now and up until recently there would still be about 2 hours a week spent in cfstudio. Thanks to a great blog entry by Brian Rinaldi and the answer I was looking for posted by Kevin Benore. I use CFEclipse at work where I have access to many mapped drives and these are usually where all of our code sits. In CFStudio I used to just create a project directly to the project folder on the mapped drive and have all of my files in one nice view. For awhile now I have been using the File Explorer view in CFEclipse to do my development because everytime I would create a project and try to edit a file I was getting the following error.

Save could not be completed.
Reason:
Has been changed on the file system

After looking through Brian Rinaldi's blog entry on this very topic I finally found the answer.

Mark Drew from the CFEclipse development team has told me the following. "This is a commonly ocurring problem when you have local virus checker, uncheck 'scan network drives' and the problem should go away."

So I gave it a try and that is exactly what the problem was. I was so relieved to find this answer. Now between work and home I am a fulltime CFEclipse user.

Windows Live Writer Beta & BlogCFC Part I

If you follow this blog then you will know that I am a big fan of BlogCFC, if you are new to this blog well now you know. Once again just a quick kudos to the creator Ray Camden, great job Ray! One complaint that I hear from people is they just do not like using the text area to publish articles. Some people (including me) have no problem coding in text areas. This is mainly because I write most of my articles in Google Docs before I publish them anyways. I understand why some people just do not like the boring old text area and fortunately for those people BlogCFC has an answer. The two answers you have are using a rich text editor such as fckEditor or TinyMCE or using the built in XML-RPCsupport. This article will not cover the rich text option (but you can email me on the topic if you like) but we will dive deeply into the XML-RPC option as well as using the new Windows Live Writer Beta.

Before we go into XML-RPC support in BlogCFC I guess we should cover what XML-RPC is. First lets take a look at the definition by the XML-RPC website

It's a spec and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet. It's remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned.

So basically it is a specification that allows us to make remote calls over the Internet using http & XML. This allows software on the Internet to be driven by desktop or hand held applications. Now that you have a little idea of what it is lets talk about it more specifically in BlogCFC. BlogCFC, from what I can tell added XML-RPC support in version 5.5 so If you are running a previous version you need to upgrade. Wait, if you are running anything other than the latest release (5.8.001 at the time of this article) than you need to upgrade!

Ok, now you are caught up on the technical stuff lets talk about the software and why this came about. I have a customer who enjoys blogging in her personal time but just does not like the traditional text area or rich text area interfaces. I told her no problem I have the answer you are looking for. She is a windows customer so told her to take a look at Windows Live Writer Beta. Windows Live Writer Beta is a desktop application that makes it easy to publish rich content to your blog. Let's take a look at a look at some of the features

• Compatible with your blog service - Writer can publish to Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Moveable Type, Community Server, and many other weblog services.
• WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing - Writer knows your blog's visual theme. So you can see exactly what your posts will look like as you write them, before you publish. No more wasting time previewing your posts online.
• Rich media publishing - Writer makes publishing rich media as easy as sending e-mail. Insert and customize photos, maps, tags, and lots of other cool content--then click the "Publish" button. It's that easy.
• Powerful editing features - Creating compelling blog posts is much easier with the ability to insert and edit tables, check spelling as you type, and format and hyperlink content at your fingertips.
• Offline editing - Now you can blog anytime, from anywhere. Writer synchronizes drafts on your blog with changes you make when you're offline, so you don't have to worry about reconciling different versions.

One of my favorite features of the software is that it allows you to change views for the post between code view, web layout & a full preview using your blogs theme. The full preview mode is going to be a hug hit with my customers. I also like the image & table support it brings. Finally as noted above the software allows for offline editing. You can either save the draft as a local copy or basically publish the article to your blog as un released article. I beleive it is a combination of such a great product and software like Windows Live Writer that will allow us to start bringing BlogCFC to the masses

This will end part I of this article. I just wanted to get your feet wet with the idea that you can publish your posts with great software such as Windows Live Writer directly to your BlogCFC installation. In the next article we will take a look how to install the service & setting up your options. If you can not wait and want to install it you may run into some issues. If you do feel free to email me or comment here. Also want to send out a big thanks to Scott Pinkston who helped me get through a couple of installation issues.