Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

I have put up my CFEclipse Reloaded presentation online for your viewing pleasure under my Presentations. It includes a lot of information on how to edit your frameworks explorer as well as how to fix the language dictionaries if you find errors. You can check it out there as well as my other presentations or you can download it directly

Its time again for the fantastic cfObjective in Minneapolis! I am heading off tomorrow morning and should be in town by mid afternoon (all going well) If you want to follow the adventures of people at the conference check out the following link http://twitter.com/cfobjective/with_friends See you all there!

I have been having a bit of a play with Eclipse's DLTK and Aptana to build two versions of CFEclipse, or rather a CFML editor. They are not complete yet (in fact, the editor doesn't work yet in either). And I thought I would put them up for people to see what I have done, contribute, play etc. No, there will be no downloads as yet, its just source, so you have to build and debug it yourself, besides, apart from being plugins there isnt really a workable editor there yet. The part that is really missing from both is me hooking up the CFML parser. The SVN locations are: Aptana based CFML Editor: http://svn.cfeclipse.org/experimental/com.aptana.ide.editor.cfml/ DLTK based CFML Editor: http://svn.cfeclipse.org/experimental/org.cfeclipse.dltk.cfml/ They both have readme.txt files that say which tutorial I have followed, but as I said, I havent finished them After some investigation, I have also found that both the Aptana and DLTK can both use ANTLR based parsers, which I presume will be for most editors. Mark Mandel did a lot of work on using Antlr to create a language parser and tokenizer which I havent had a good proper play with as yet. But it has been checked in and people can have a play. There is no documentation as yet, but will work on some of that at a later stage. http://svn.cfeclipse.org/org.cfeclipse.cfml.core/trunk/ I havent integrated it yet into either of the projects as yet, but that will my next step.

Thanks to a lot of hard work by Jim Priest over the last few weeks, http://www.cfeclipse.org has been given a thorough making over! Jim will be helping the project as the webmaster for the site and has been doing a sterling job in keeping the Trac/Wiki updated for a long while now, so many thanks need to go to his contribution to the project What do you think of the new site?

I was interviewed this week by Paul Vernon just before CFUnited Europe that starts this week here in London. If you fancy reading the article, click on over to http://www.fusionauthority.com/community/4735-an-interview-with-mark-drew-speaker-at-cfunited-europe.htm

Tom Chiverton just sent me a link to a great article on Adobe.com Check it out at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/eclipse_extensions.html

One of the most requested features in CFEclipse is to have insight into CFC's to have method completion. I thought I would detail some of the problems that are involved in this task from an editor. I am putting this together so that when people ask me why not, I can point them to this, and of course, if they come up with some good answers, they can post them here! 1) What CFC are we calling? The simplest way to call a CFC is to do the following: <cfinvoke component="uk.co.markdrew.MyCompnent" returnvariable="myComp"> Now, at runtime, ColdFusion would figure out where "uk.co.markdrew.MyComponent" is located, this could be either by doing mappings in ColdFusion or in fact, by VirtualDirectories in Apache/IIS. This is pretty hard in CFEclipse unless we add a "uk/co/markdrew/MyCompnent.cfc in your project. If you had a separate directory, lets say you keep your components in /Project/components/uk/co/markdrew/MyComponent.cfc", it would be hard. Not impossible, since we can add linked folders and a feature I have been working on is to be able to mark a folder as a mapping, but pretty hard for all the different cases and layouts that people will have 2) A CFC location from a variable Since you can pass variables to tags, you could pass the CFC as a variable, for example: <cfinvoke component="#APPLICATION.MyComponent#" returnvariable="myComp"> In this case, and similar cases, it would be VERY hard to find out what myComp actually is! If the "APPLICATION.MyComponent" is set in Application.cfc for example or anywhere else (in the many different ways of setting an application variable, that I am not even going to go into here!) it would be impossible to find out what myComp is. 3) What is the returned object? The above code is probably something you wont do a lot, but how about something like: <cfinvoke component="uk.co.markdrew.MyCompnent" method="getObject" returnvariable="myComp"> And the function is defined as: <cffunction name="getObject" returntype="Any">
   <!--- Losts of complicated ways of getting an object, like looking it up in a database --->
   <cfreturn someObject>
</cffunction> How would the editor know what the object, and thus what funtions it had, is? This is very much like what happens in ColdSpring so unless we write CFEclipse so it actually does everything a CF server does (and even then, that is dangerous at runtime!) it wont be able to know what is happening! So, how would you get round these problems? (put aside that its in Eclipse, try writing a parser in CF that just reads text files and let me know how you get on!)

I am showing mine, how would you show yours? Or maybe your dedication to your chosen bit of technology? Answers on a postcard (or tattoo'd on your flesh)...

So, I am going to be presenting at few conferences this year (more on that soon!) and I wanted to get some community feedback about what you would like to hear about and even get demo's on. I have a few things I want to demonstrate but I am sure people out there have questions along the lines of "how do I..." or know of features that thing would be of use to people out there. So, an open source presentation?? Maybe not but I would welcome your ideas/feedback!

As I am sure a lot of people have noticed, I have been rather quiet on the CFEclipse development front. Well, I am now going to re-start the development of it, and wondered if people (that maybe read this blog) have any features they would really like to see in the next version. This is a call to feedback for features, that is not bugs (so please dont put "I would really like to see the feature of not having a bug when... xyz" So its over to you, I have a few features that are coming up, mainly some spring cleaning and changes to the UI. Thanks for the feedback in advance!