cf.Objective() Mark Drew: CFEclipse

Mark Drew is presenting on CFEclipse. He's the lead developer for the CFEclipse project.

Session opens with funny slide stating session as "Intro to Homesite".

Then Mark asks who in the crowd already uses CFEclipse. All but a few hands shot up. This is significant considering his session got moved to the big room (attendance is almost what it was for the keynote).

He covers a little of the history. Started by Rob Rohan... I'll let you find that if you're curious.

He talks about what Eclipse is. It's a Java IDE that has an API for adding other plugin IDEs. CFEclipse is one of these plugins for Eclipse. It is a plugin for CFML developers. It has support for multiple versions of the CFML syntax. So, that you can have correct code completion and insight for CFMX 6,7,(8?), Bluedragon, Railo...

The newer CFEclipse releases have a CFML toolbar at the top of each files tab (ala HomeSite).

CFEclipse has a nice Snippets feature. It includes syntax for making snippets prompt you for stuff.

For example if your snippet was

Then, it would promp you for "var" and if you punched "session" into the prompt, you'd get the below

This is a simple example. But, I have snippets at work that have several replacement fields some of which have default actions. So, my snippets are almost like little code gen wizards.

He also, showed how you can connect to and edit files from arbitrary file or FTP locations instead of only in your projects.

Next up, TODO: comments. When you enter a comment that starts with "TODO:", it shows up in a task view at the bottom. Again, I've found this one very useful at work.

Mark is now showing the Scribble pad in CFEclipse. This is a cool feature. You just create a scribble.cfm template in your webroot. Then you go into the preferences for CFEclipse in Eclipse and map out where it is. Then the next time you want to run a little snippet of CF, you hit F8 and it will pop up that file. Then you type in your snippet, save it, and hit F5. This will run your snippet in the browser docked at the bottom. Simple, easy, time-saver.

Ok, now here's the big news...

"Project: Unity"

Project: Unity is a companion to CFEclipse. It is a tool for working with any of the modern CFML frameworks that are configured via XML! It will auto-detect the framework. Then in the view panel, you can drill down into the configuration file for the app. For instance, in a Fusebox 4/5 app, it will drill down into the circuits. If you double-click a specific fuseaction, it will jump you into the correct circuit.xml file at the correct line. There's a lot more to it than that. Way more! It will even introspect the configuration files and help you add new nodes to the file. It works slick.

It looks like it already has support for several frameworks. And the plugin itself is configured by XML. So, with a little work, it can really support any framework that has XML configuration files!

I must say it: Mark Drew, you are a rock-star!