A few people have asked me about the ColdFusion Builder scripts for Linux for the new 1.0.
I'm sorry to say that I won't be doing a script for ColdFusion Builder on Linux for the 1.0 release.
I tried this morning to run my usual scripts to get a plugin install out of ColdFusion builder, which ran fine, but after installing and attempting to run it, I was met with a dreaded:
!ENTRY com.adobe.ide.editor.cfml 4 0 2010-03-23 09:39:50.110
!MESSAGE
Whenever I opened a CFML file (which doesn't tell me much about what is going on where).
There is obviously something native built into ColdFusion Builder 1.0, that wasn't present in Beta 3 (I can see some .dll's etc), which is causing this error to occur. Adobe have also done the right thing, and removed all the debugging so that would be hackers have a hard time working out what is going on where.
If you want to get involved in evangelising ColdFusion Builder on Linux, there are some things you can do:
- Vote for the bug!
- Vote for the Flash Builder bug too (if they do one, they will have to do the other!)
- Bug your evangelists! (But do it in a nice way) Conference season is coming up, so have a chat with them when you see them around, and let them know that you would buy a copy for Linux.
- Run it in VMWare / VirtualBox
- Change your OS of choice (ECH!)
At the end of the day, I'm only upset about there being no Linux version, because I think ColdFusion Builder is a great product, and I want it to have as much exposure as it can. We need to convince Adobe that the Linux market is a viable one, and will have a good return on investment.
If I hear of any changes in the Linux landscape for ColdFusion Builder, I'll be sure to let you know.
UPDATE (21 October 2009): This will no longer work with Beta 2 of ColdFusion builder. If you are looking for a more up to date technique for installing ColdFusion Builder on Linux, please see this post .
So I’ve managed to hack my way to getting Bolt installed on Linux, and
it wasn’t quite as painful as I thought it was going to be. It is
essentially a pure plug-in install, but we have to jump though a few
hoops to get the plug-in itself.
I would suggest starting with a clean installation of Eclipse 3.4.2, with a clean workspace, just to make sure there are no major issues.
Here are the steps you need to reproduce:
-
Download ColdFusion Builder for Windows. I used 32 bit, but I don't think it matters.
- in the terminal run: unzip cfbuilder_{your version}.exe, to extract all the content.
(Update 16/09/09, as Universal Extractor isn't actually needed, see comments)
-
Install Universal Extractor - http://legroom.net/software/uniextract
(I installed under CrossOver office, and it worked a treat, should work under Wine)
Extract the data from bolt.exe (I extracted to /tmp/bolt), using Universal Extractor- Extract /tmp/bolt/InstallerData/Disk1/InstData/Resource1.zip, (I extracted to /tmp/Resource1/)
-
Under /tmp/Resource1/Z_/dist/installer you will find ’installerdist_zg_ia_sf.jar’
- Unzip this .jar file, you will find the /plugins and /features directories you need for a plugin install on Eclipse.
- Extract those 2 directories into your Eclipse installation.
- If you want the CF Builder Extension Samples, you can find them inside /tmp/Resource1/Z_/installer as ’samples_zg_ia_sf.jar’. Open up that archive and there they are!
- Fire up Eclipse, and you should now find you have a ColdFusion perspective!
So far, there is only 1 annoying bug I’ve found.
When using CTRL+J to insert a snippet, it inserts perfectly, however, I
find I have to click outside of Eclipse, and then back into Eclipse
with my mouse before I can edit again (very weird, I know). It's annoying, but I can work around it.
Hopefully we can provide enough free testing for ColdFusion Beta on
Linux, and prove we have a large enough user base, that we can get
supported on Linux.
Make sure any bugs you run into are reported to the
ColdFusion Builder Bug Tracker page, so that Adobe is aware of them.
Yet another reminder I should get off my lazy butt and do some CF/Eclipse work -
Mike Nimer decided to build himself a CFlog viewer and it's pretty neat too.
To copy and paste - it's features include:
- Supports the ColdFusion log format.
- Supports multiple Log Folders
- Keeps a live connection to the log file open, so you can see errors as they happen. Without reloading the log file.
- Highlights all .cfm files in error message, so you can easily find the bad template.
Nice work Mike!
The new CFEclipse has been released - with some awesome new features: Ehanced CFC Browser, Bracket Highlighting, Text drag and drop, cold folding, and a whole slew of bug fixes!
More details can be seen at here
Thanks for your work guys!
Just a note to let anyone who doesn't know -
I'm doing a presentation this Thursday to the Melbourne CFUG on using Eclipse as a IDE for developing ColdFusion.
To c/p from the notice that was sent out to the CFAUSSIE mailing list, I will be presenting:
- Installing Eclipse
- Plugin installation (including CFEclipse, as well as several handy others)
- Overview of using Eclipse and it's capabilities.
- Overview of CFEclipse and it's capabilities.
- General Q & A.
I will basically be taking a clean computer - and installing Eclipse, and then going through installing plugins piece by piece, so if you are new to Eclipse, it should (hopefully) leave you with a good idea about how to set up Eclipse for yourself as a good IDE for developing ColdFusion - which can be a bit of a hurdle if you have never used Eclipse before.
The plugins I will be installing (for reference)
I hope to see some people there!
Much thanks to Rob from CFEclipse for pointing this out for me.
Eclipse by default does not support Unicode / UTF-8.
Turning it on, is very easy if you know where it is.
Goto:
Window > Preferences > Workbench > Editors
At the bottom of that screen you can see 'Text file encoding'. Just choose the relevent one (choices range from US-ASCII to UTF-8), click the one you want, and presto, away you go.
Then just reopen the UTF-8 file you had, and presto - Unicode Support!
Opened up my Eclipse, and got notified that there is now a 1.1.15 version of CFEclipse! (I should have known this anyway as I'm on the mailing list, but looks like I missed that one! Ooops!).
Looks good! Some new features are sweet - particularly that you can now sort CFC methods to alphabetical and back again, in the CFC methods viewer.
The new snippet preview is nice, and the snippet trigger is good - however it is a tad buggy so be careful.
- You can't use a trigger that is only a single character - so don't even try. no 'c' or 'f' or 'g'. It has to be at least 2 characters.
- When changing your snippet triggers, they may not show up as changed when you look at it again - this is because the plugin doesn't actually delete the old trigger, so it will still be able to be used. So I suggest choosing wisely before setting your triggers. (That being said, you can manually change triggers via the \eclipse\workspace\.metadata\.plugins\com.rohanclan.cfml\keyCombos.properties file, it's pretty easy, and takes effect straight away)
- Supposedly you need a whitespace character before your trigger, otherwise when you hit CTRL+I, it won't work. I haven't seen this one happen, but keep an eye out for it.
Overall, however, the upgrade is nice, provides some good bug fixes, and these bugs can be worked around.
Oh yeah - and despite the controversy, they are still using my Icon ;o) (Although I'm sure someone will come up with something better eventually).
Enjoy :o)
I thought I would do a second impression on eclipse and cfeclipse, simply because I've been using it for the last few days, and have really had a chance to get into it.
Quite frankly, I love it.
The new verison (1.1.13) has just come in, with some great bug fixes, and it is so nice to use.
Things I love about cfeclipse:
- Snips - These things totally rock my world. The fact you can code in user variables, and have default values such as $${MONTH} and $${CURRENTFILE} provided for you, make things SO easy. Before I started using these, I missed all the Homesite tag editors, just because of the speed. Now I just make a small snip with custom elements, and presto, it's pretty much the same. (Keyboard shortcuts for snippets are coming, which is good).
- CF Outline view and CFC Method view. I've been dying for these for a while. I'm so used to them in Java IDE's, it's great to have them here too.
- I do all my editing in a single IDE. I love that, it saves me so much time.
- The fact that CFEclipse is has a strong, driven development team. I love the fact that I can go 'you know, it would be nice if you had void on the code completion for cffuntion', and look, it's there in this release. Failing that, I'll go write it myself (as soon as I get some time to play with eclipse plugins).
Things I don't like about cfeclipse.
- The new icon. I totally understand why you changed it, but UGH! It aint pretty.
Things I use with cfeclipse (half covered with last post)
- CSSEditor - works fine with 3.0, hit ctrl+space, and you have some css completion. Perfect for what I need.
- JSEditor - The guy who made this has dissapeared, but it's neat, and has code completion too.
- XMLBuddy - The free version of this is really good, and I'm seriously contemplating buying a pro version for XSL work. (I can't find a decent XSL editor for Eclipse that is free.)
My contributions
- A new icon for CFEclipse.
(Right click and save as). Pop it in "/eclipse/plugins/com.rohanclan.cfm{version}\icons\obj16\", and you have a nice pretty blue document. I had to do this, because I really didn't like the icon.
- Comment Header Snip - I used the old comment header extension for Homesite+ alot, so I made a snip that emulated it. Here you go. Drop this in your snips directory, and you can use it as you see fit.
There we go. Download Eclipse. Install CFEclipse. Have some fun.
Go on. Do it.
Do it. </bad Starsky and Hutch Reference>
Well, I've got some UTF-8 Coldfusion development I am working on, so I was forced to ditch Homesite+, and find an editor that I could use that would support Unicode.
There was no way I was going across to Dreamweaver (heh), so I figured it was about time to check out Eclipse and CFEclipse.
I also generally liked the idea of not having to shift between IDEs as I work - no more flitting from Homesite to Topstyle to XmlSpy... etc etc. It would all be contained within the one IDE and it would be wonderful.
Well at least that was the idea.
I grabbed a copy of Eclipse 3.0, primarily (a) because CFEclipse only runs on 3.0 and (b) I love having new things. The install ran fine, after I moved past a small JRE issue that some Oracle software had pushed via a only JRE 1.3 lying around after my machine without too much trouble.
Then I hit my first issue. Tigris.org is all in Japanese for me, except for some english. That made getting cfeclipse a tad tricky. No idea why it is. Sent the website a email today, so I'll let you know when I get a reply.
Managed to get it down, and installed it - no issue. Sweet. Open up eclipse, create a new project, yup all looks good.
Find some small issue with CFeclipse, nothing major, but I wanted to report it, or see if it was going to be fixed. (I'm running verison 1.1.9 beta)... oh yeah, can't do that because the site is in Japanese. Sod. Well I'll subscribe to the mailing list... yeah... can't find it because my Japanese isn't so good.
EDIT ::: Looks like all my winging produced some effects! I can now see the site in English. That's brilliant, now I'm going to sign up.
Fired off an email to CFAussie, and got subscribed to the mailing list. Going to post up some bugs soon, hopefully I won't be stepping on anyone's toes because I can't find/read the bug tracker.
So now I need a CSS editor... awesome, plugin "CSS Eclipse Plugin" into google, and got the csseditor plugin for eclipse. Allright. Load that in.. and.... now I have some basic CSS validation. It's no topstyle (lite?) but it does the trick... that's cool, it's open source, and it's free, and my css is decent enough (although a colour picker would have been nice. Maybe I can find a plugin for that in Eclipse).
EDIT ::: I discovered the documentation for the css editor, and of course you can hit 'ctrl + space' and it will get some content assistance - so all in all, a pretty good editor!
So I go hunting a XML editor too, because I do a fair bit of XML work. I found x-men, looks great! nope.. doesn't work with 3.0.. I end up going with XMLbuddy, which looks good, but unless I buy the pro version, isn't going to do all of what I want.
So overall, I'm doing okay - I've started developing with Eclipse, and I'm loving the CFC method view and Outline view of CFEclipse, it's something I've been dying for for ages. So that stuff does rock.
Eclipse and it's range of plugins so far seem to be good but not great. This is probably a gripe coming from soneone who is used to really mature commercial software, and so there is that bias. So factoring in what you can get for free out of eclipse it is pretty darn good. However, to that point, I found the support of 3.0 to be quite lacking by alot of the plugins out there.
So I do want to say that Eclipse (and said plugins) are really good products considering the relative time they have been around, and the fact that they are developed as open source, free products.
I'm going to complete this project with Eclipse before I decide it's a keeper or not, but if you develop with ColdFusion and you don't want to user Dreamweaver, and you are afraid Homesite is going to be a dead end, I highly suggest that you give Eclipse a go. That and the ability to really extend your IDE yourself is a very powerful feature.
Just bring a monkey wrench in case things go wrong ;o)
