Charlie Arehart posted this to the CFMeetup site this morning so I thought I’d announce it here too. I will be speaking to the CFMeetup group on Thursday, August 20th at 12:00pm ET. We are going to be talking about one way to set up a development environment for ColdFusion application development that will use Eclipse 3.5 and Tomcat 6 to allow you to develop your applications against any of the major CFML server engines out there today.
This will be my first CFMeetup presentation and I’m both nervous and excited.
The link for the CFMeetup is http://www.meetup.com/coldfusionmeetup/calendar/11128508/.
UPDATE: I’ve attached the slides and XML snippet that I referenced in the presentation. The URL for the recording is http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p39094247/. Thanks to everyone for attending and for all the feedback.
For the past couple of months, I’ve been running my CFML server engines (yes engines, plural) on top of Tomcat on my local development environment. This offers me, as an independent developer that works on a number of different client projects, a great deal of flexibility in matching a particular client’s production configuration. Also lately, I’ve been working on a couple of projects using Railo 3.1 as well as a project for a client that still uses CFMX 7. One of the things that I really missed when not developing with ColdFusion 8 is the step debugger that ships with CF8. I’d used FusionDebug some time ago with CFMX 7 when I was running it on top of JRun 4 but had never gotten around to getting it configured under my current, Tomcat-based setup. Until tonight that is.
I ran into a situation while working on a MachII application running on Railo 3.1 where I REALLY need to see what was going on with the various variable scopes during the request cycle, so I decided tonight to see if I could get FusionDebug 3 Beta up and running with Railo and Tomcat.
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I sometimes have to remind myself what a useful tool the debugger that’s built into ColdFusion 8 is. Today I was debugging a fairly involved process that I’ve been writing that uses several CFCs including on CFC that contains methods to apply all the business rules to the particular process. I had a couple of values that weren’t getting set just correctly so I fired up a debugging session and started to work through the process flow to determine where I was losing the value in question.
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A couple weeks ago I posted about moving our SVN repositories to a hosted solution at CVSDude.com. I primarily wanted to do that so that I wouldn’t have to be responsible for administering the SVN server (performing backups, configuring hook scripts etc). I’ve got enough on my plate right now without trying to become an SVN guru. Another reason is that they offer Trac as an option for your repositories (with certain types of accounts). I have been wanting to start using Trac to manage tickets for a while, but the install and configuration process is still quite a bit outside my range of Linux knowledge at this point.
One thing that has bugged me in our business is a lack of a good, centralized place to store lists of things that I need to do. A few years ago when we only had 1 or 2 projects going, I could keep all this stuff in my head. Now, as we have more clients and more projects going (and probably due in some measure to me getting older), I find that certain things are starting to get lost in the shuffle. This makes a really bad impressions on clients and is frustrating for me as well. That’s where Mylyn comes in.
Mylyn is a plugin for Eclipse that lets you set up queries against the tickets in Trac and view those from within Eclipse itself. It’s like having someone who constantly updates your To Do list for you. Once you’ve got everything configured, Eclipse periodically synchronizes your Task list with the Trac site and pops up an alert window if there are any new tasks that come down. Setup was pretty simple (if you’re using CVSDude, they have an easy-to-follow guide to setup the Eclipse plugin with their system).
Since I have each project set up in its own SVN repository, it’s as simple as adding a “task library” for each repo and suddenly I have one place to look for all the things I need to do, automatically grouped by project. I think I’m going to like what Eclipse/Trac/Mylyn will do for me.
Thanks to a late afternoon winter storm yesterday, I am spending the weekend in Chantilly, VA. I was due to go home yesterday (and really looking forward to it too!) but the storm cancelled most of the flights out of Dulles and I was told they couldn’t get me back to Nashville until Sunday. Since I had to be back up here Monday, it didn’t make sense to do that, so I’m just not going home this weekend.
The bad part about the situation (which my lovely wife is in the process of fixing as I write this) is that my shiny new Macbook Pro was delivered to my house on Thursday. Sooo…I’ll have to wait a couple more days before I can get my hands on it. She is shipping it up here to the office so hopefully I’ll have it sometime Monday and can start setting it up. I have to give my current Dell laptop to my cousin on Wednesday night next week so it’ll be a horse race to try to get ColdFusion, CFEclipse, MySQL etc all set up and working correctly by then.
Anyway, “every cloud has a silver lining” they say. This one is that my schedule for this weekend just got cleared so I’m going to try to make some headway on some side work I have pending.
