There were a bunch of posts this week announcing that ColdFusion Builder 2 is now available, and that there is now a free ("Express") edition -- but all of the posts I saw listed the things that are not in the Express edition. What about what is in the Express edition? It's not peanuts.
The CFBuilder team did put up a feature matrix on their blog, but uh, it's not very friendly at the moment. (It's an image that's too small to make out in the thumbnail and the full size is too big -- not to mention they should both be cropped.)
So here's a look at the things that Adobe is giving away for free.
- Code Assist: It knows CFML and provides suggestions for available tags, their properties, and so on. (Code Insight, which looks at the code you're writing and offers query variables when you need them, and so on, is not in Express Edition.)
- Extensions: Caveat: They can't use callbacks or provide Code Assist suggestions
- Debugging
- File Preview
- ORM Support
- Tag Editor
- Server Manager: Caveat: For localhost only
- Snippets
- Keyboard Shortcuts: These are customizable and you can add your own, too.
- Tasks: By using comments containing "todo:" or "fixme:" (also customizable)
- Project Start Page
- 64 bit support
- Native File Launcher
- RDS File View
- RDS Database Browsing
- Services Browser: Shows information on all of the CFCs that your local server knows about
Some of these things are expected -- like Snippets and Keyboard shortcuts -- but there are some nice additions in there. Extensions is a big one -- there are already 54 CFB Extensions on RIAForge, and you can use them all. Some may make use of callbacks or be specifically for the purpose of adding Code Assist suggestions, such as for a framework, and that functionality won't work.
I think it's great that Adobe was able to provide a free edition, and I think even the free edition beats the competition in features. Not too shabby.
Posted in
CFBuilder
| 3 Responses
May 04 2011
First of all, many thanks to Adobe Engineer Krishna Reddy for helping me through this issue. I was only able to work through it with his help.
Now, you've been getting this error when you install CFBuilder 2 and start it up, right? As far as I know it only happens on Mac OSX, and for me, it only happened after I reformatted my machine. It had installed fine prior to reformatting. I've also heard reports from people who tried to install on a recently purchased Mac computer.
As it turns out, this is a permissions issue. I'll walk through the steps one at a time for those that need it, but for the advanced users, here's a synopsis: do a chmod 755 on this (randomly generated) location and then re-run the installer.
/private/var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee+++++++++++/Cleanup\ At\ Startup
Obviously, since it's randomly generated, that directory is not likely to exist for you. The part of the path that's constant is: /private/var/folders/{random-2-letters}/{random-longer}/Cleanup At Startup
Step by step
Open Terminal and enter these commands:
sudo find /private/var/folders/ -name Cleanup\ At\ Startup -- This command will search all subfolders of /private/var/folders for a folder/file named "Cleanup At Startup" and tell you where it found it.- Then go into the location that contains the Cleanup At Startup folder. In my case:
cd /private/var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee+++++++++++
- You can optionally verify the problem by running:
ls -al. You'll see this line:
drwx------@ 2 adam staff 68 Mar 8 08:59 Cleanup At Startup
The important bit is the first section. The listing drwx------ indicates that it is a directory (d) and that it is readable (r), writable (w), and executable (x) by the owning account ("adam" in this example). The next 3 characters are the read/write/execute permissions for members of the assigned group ("staff" in this example), and the last 3 are for everyone else. Since the group and others blocks are both "---", then nobody but the owner account can do anything with the directory. This is the problem we're fixing.
sudo chmod 755 Cleanup\ At\ Startup
At this point you'll be prompted for your computer's administrator password to make the change.
755 translates to rwxr-xr-x, and what that means is that we want to let anyone access this folder. If we wanted to make it "world-writable" then we could use 777, which translates to rwxrwxrwx.
After this, the installer can properly access these temp locations and do everything that it needs to do. Re-run the installer and get back to work!
These instructions apply specifically to the Stand-alone ("Standard") installation.
Lastly, I should point out that this entry earns the coveted "Works on my machine!" award:
I can't guarantee that this will fix your problem, but hey, it worked for me. At the very least, making these changes won't hurt anything.
Remember: This is beta software! There will be some bugs. That's the price you pay for free, early access.
Posted in
CFBuilder
| No Responses Yet
March 21 2011
When you create a new ColdFusion project in CFBuilder, you end up with 3 things in your project folder:
- A .project file -- this is par for the course in Eclipse
- A .settings folder
- And a settings.xml file
During the pre-release process I voiced my opinion that this was too much meta and that they should find a way to cut back or combine where possible. That hasn't happened. In addition, I complained that the file name "settings.xml" is too generic and quite likely to be something that the average developer would want to create for their project. This, too, seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
Oh well. Maybe next time.
However, in the meantime, I've created a quick shortcut for my Mac to create a new git repository and ignore all of the CFB Project Meta files all in one step. On Snow Leopard, edit the .profile file in your account folder (/Users/[your username]/.profile) and add this line:
alias cfgit="git init;echo '.project' >> .gitignore;echo '.settings' >> .gitignore;echo 'settings.xml' >> .gitignore;echo '.gitignore' >> .gitignore;git status"
It all has to be on one line to work properly, but I'll break down each command individually here so that it's easier to read.
alias cfgit="..."
Here we're creating a bash command alias. This translates to, "When I type cfgit I want you to do [this] instead." Where [this] is what you put inside the quotation marks. You can put multiple commands here as long as you separate them with a semicolon.
echo '.project' >> .gitignore;
echo '.settings' >> .gitignore;
echo 'settings.xml' >> .gitignore;
echo '.gitignore' >> .gitignore;
Each of these appends a new line to the file .gitignore with the contents of the single-quotation marks; so in this case it's adding a new line for .project, .settings, settings.xml, and .gitignore (ignore itself). By using >> instead of >, you append to the file if it exists, or create it otherwise. If you're unaware, the .gitignore file tells the local git client which files in the folder are to be excluded from the repository.
Lastly, it runs git status to show the current status of the folder/repository; mostly just as a sanity check to make sure that everything that I want to have happened has.
Posted in
Apple |
CFBuilder |
Git
| 4 Responses
July 06 2010
Every so often, despite what might seem like obvious reasons to some of us, we still see arguments against paying for the IDE that Adobe has provided for CFML development -- ColdFusion Builder. "Why should I pay for CFB when CFEclipse is free?!" Here, I'll make a case for the minuscule ($300!) price-tag that Adobe is charging for the awesome editor that is CFB.
There are a lot of features that CFB provides that no other CFML editor currently does; and some of them are kind of subtly named. They may not sound like much by name alone, but each is a powerful and useful feature in its own right. Lots of details after the jump. You may want to freshen your drink first.
Read more →
Posted in
CFBuilder
| 24 Responses
May 24 2010
