An Architect's View

Ant is a build / automation tool that can do a lot more than just copy files around. Derek Perez has just discovered ant and is already in love with it! His blog entry talks about using ant inside Eclipse (ant is pre-packaged with Eclipse) to automatically compile CFML to Java bytecode and create numbered "builds" for deployment to other servers. You can even download his build.xml script. If you haven't discovered the joys of ant yet, you should read his blog entry and realize how much easier ant can make your life.

I've been a bit lapse about blogging this - Mark Drew is creating a stunning series of short video tutorials on how to use features in Eclipse and CFEclipse. If you use CFEclipse, you must bookmark this page. If you don't use CFEclipse, this series might well persuade you t convert.

After much hoopla (and a Herculean development effort from the amazing Mark Drew), CFEclipse 1.3 is available for download. I've already updated. So should you :)

Recently I've been receiving a steady stream of emails about CFEclipse asking whether or not the project is dead. Seriously! What prompts these emails is two-fold: 1) the CFEclipse roadmap page on the website shows "Release 1.3 is pencilled in for early in the first calendar quarter of 2006" and 2) I'm listed at Project Manager on the members page. The roadmap page also says "Release 2.0 is pencilled in for late in the third calendar quarter of 2006". So, yes, the website is terribly out of date. CFEclipse is still chugging along tho', driven almost entirely by the wonderful Mark Drew. You can read the CFEclipse category on his blog to stay abreast of everything he is working on - including a new website "coming soon". Remember that this is a volunteer project and anyone contributing does so on their own time, in addition to everything else they have to do (e.g., earning a living). If you find a bug, tell Mark or, better still if you know Java, get the source and try to figure out a fix and send Mark a patch. If you find the documentation wanting, write something to fill the gap and send it to Mark. If you want to help, send Mark a note - he has plenty of things that need doing and he'll line you up with a volunteer task! Thank you for all your sterling work on CFEclipse, Mark! Note that he is happy to take donations via his blog and he has a wishlist!

Mark Drew - the driving force behind CFEclipse these days - is asking for your testimonials about how much value you get from using CFEclipse as part of the promotional material for the upcoming overhaul of the cfeclipse.org website!

Thanx to the sterling efforts of Mark Drew, the CFEclipse project has migrated to Trac for bug tracking. No more tigris.org - yay! Mark has already started assigning bugs to target milestones and has asked folks to review the bugs and help him comment, classify and debug the issues.

Simeon Bateman posted an announcement today that he has moved Model-Glue and Reactor to an enhanced Trac/SVN server and has also setup Trac and SVN for the CFEclipse project! This is great news and another step along the way of getting CFEclipse off the Tigris site and making it easier for the community to get involved with the development of this great, open source IDE. As Simeon notes, we're planning to move the Fusebox project to this new server too but we really want to create fusebox.org subdomains for it - the request has gone out to John Quarto-vonTivadar who owns the fusebox.org hosting setup to get these setup. I'll keep you posted!

I use Perforce at work for source code control and the p4mac client is a little flaky (and more than a little ugly and unintuitive). I wondered if there was an Eclipse plugin for it and, sure enough, Perforce make a plugin for WebSphere Studio that works perfectly with Eclipse 3.2 on my MacBook Pro. Yay! It does require the p4 command-line utility but that's easy to download from the Perforce site. The P4 perspective in Eclipse is pretty good to work with and the plugin provides rich context menus for accessing most everything you need.

Paul Kenney will soon (hopefully) make available a new version of cfcUnit with ant integration so that you can automatically run your unit tests as part of your build process. He let me have a preview copy and it works really well. Since a couple of folks have heard me talk about this and asked me to blog the 'how to' I figured that even in advance of Paul officially releasing this, I'd go ahead and explain what you can do with it and how easy it is to set it all up.

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Mark Drew just announced the availability of a beta version of the next major stable release of CFEclipse. You can download the 1.3 Beta version from the CFEclipse website. Note that it requires Eclipse 3.2 (not 3.1.x). The thing you'll notice immediately is the HomeSite-style toolbars... nice!