what do I know

I’m really glad my co-workers said they wanted me to go to this talk. Mark Drew has a hilariously dry sense of belittling humor that is awesome. He showed off the latest features in CFEclipse 1.3.whatever. There was a lot of stuff I didn’t know. This is what I can remember from today since I didn’t take as many notes:

• Ability to drag stylesheet, script, and image files into any page and have the HTML for them auto-generated
• Integration of ftp and sftp into the File Explorer view
• Crazy templating in snippets; definitely something we should do at work to make writing CFML easier. We can even share these on a network drive to keep it simple.
• Scribble pad integration actually working was cool

The new great features for CFEclipse were:

• The inclusion of the CFUnit/CFCUnit test runner in the latest update site release as an optional add-on
• The addition of an XML Framework configuration tool which can be extended via XML by the community

Some of the staples in the CF community have put together templates for Fusebox, Model-Glue, Mach-II, Transfer, Reactor, and ColdSpring. The basic idea of the optional add-on is that a view is now available to show you elements specific to the framework that uses XML to configure itself. Mark had not added Transfer support as of this morning; it took him roughly 15 minutes to do so via the extensibility markup that comes with the add-on. Additionally, you can script common actions and practices into the add-on so the community can contribute their favorite ways to configure a framework with a click of a button. In the end, you’re writing XML to configure a tool to abstract XML configurations for CF frameworks. The idea is cool to me, but we’ll see how it goes.

Oh BTW, it also now comes with an XPath query testing tool. You paste an XML fragment into a textarea, enter an XPath expression in a textbox, and then hit “Run”. BOOM, you’re done