Andrew's ramblings

ColdFusion Builder and development productivity

Tags: Coldfusion

I have been wanting to touch on this for awhile now, but never got around to it till now. I was hoping to sit down and also give a video tutorial on it, as these can give a lot more detail and express so much more.

In time I might still do that.

However for now I want to over a few posts go into some detail, not complete detail but enough to give you an idea on what is available in ColdFusion Builder. As well as what is available outside of ColdFusion builder, that as a ColdFusion developer you can almost say I can not live without these tools.

I dare say that the product is going to be released very soon, and even though it is an initial 1.0 release I think Adobe should be fairly pleased with the product so far. But what about us developers can the product live up to the expectations that we as developers need something strong, stable and all importantly going to be able to give us extreme productivity.

Well I dare say it but ColdFusion Builder not only gives us this, but with plugins that are around will give us more than you might ever know.

So what are some of the things that can help us with out productivity?

Remote Developer Services

This is probably better known as RDS in ColdFusion and the client products that connect to it, and has been around for a few years now. The RDS has best been known for in clients like Dreamweaver, CFEclipse and other clients that the RDS has been written for is the database. Without leaving the client one has been able to view data, and write queries against known DataSources that ColdFusion knows about, as well as browsing files.

However ColdFusion Builder goes a little bit further than this, and offers more than you would normally expect. Such enhancements are that you could start/stop a ColdFusion server remotely via RDS, connect to a remote server and run extensions on that server, which I will go into more detail later.

But what is important right now is that RDS can also be used to load the log files of ColdFusion, this might not sound that important. However consider the CF-ORM side of things for a minute, some of that will never throw an actual exception that will stop ColdFusion from running. But it will log the exception within the log files. Viewing the log files within the IDE can be handy with debugging, whether it is with the line debugger or even other methods that you might use.

Extensions

Out of the box ColdFusion Builder will allow 3rd party authors to extend what ColdFusion builder can and can't do, but for this to work you need to have the correct permission via RDS to enable this feature against the server you are working on.

For example.

Out of the box ColdFusion comes with an extension that will enable you to inspect a datasource, and in that or selected tables you could turn these tables into ColdFusion ORM entities. This might not sound like an important feature and you will need to trust me that this is very important, and that is that if you are working with legacy databases or databases that are already existing. You can map these to ColdFusion Entities via the feature Create ORM CFC, which when followed via the prompts will take an existing table and map these to a ColdFusion persistent component or better know a CF-ORM entity.

However extensions just don't end there and Adobe have made sure they don't, and by that they have allowed other developers to use ColdFusion 9 enabled servers to leverage of this functionality as much as possible.

And the best part is that Adobe have allowed us to use ColdFusion or CFML to write these lines of code, and even though right now it is only by the proprietary code enabled via RDS it gives developers an enhanced way to write Extensions to ColdFusion Builder to do the job that is required to get the job done.

So expect a lot of 3rd party extensions to surface over the coming months to do what you be looking for.

Servers

This section is a tab that exist in the main section with a few other tabs like console, TailView and Service Browser.

In this tab you define the serer you are going to connect to, this include any local and/or remote server. Although this section is far from polished it works, and is very functionally to the most seasoned user.

When you do create a server here it will be either a remote or local server, and contains enough information to the project you are working with that will satisfy most users.

Any time you import a project you will be asked which server you will wish to connect with, or that this project will run under. This is because it needs to know how to do debugging and other information, however most importantly it sets the project and ties it to that server.

Some of the other things that you could do here after setting up a server, is what I would add to productivity. Such things as being able to stop a server, restart that server, load the logs from that server or even browse the ColdFusion Administrator.

You can even launch the Server monitor from this section, provided you are running in a 32 bit version plugin standalone version, but the best thing is that you can view every server you are able to connect to and view the status of that server.

Continued next time

In the next post I will touch on some of the features that allow you to debug, and be more productive when dealing with tasks and bugs.

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