We appreciate all the feedback we receive on an ongoing basis from our listeners. You all make it worth the effort and we encourage your continued participation.
This week, we discuss preferred ColdFusion IDEs and make comparisons between ColdFusion Builder and IDEs available for other platforms. We get a tip about CFDevCamp, a planned event in the San Francisco area scheduled for November 7th, Mike surprises Brian and Micky with a pop quiz to measure their CFSCRIPT skills, and we discuss REST web services in ColdFusion and make comparisons between using REST versus ColdFusion’s built-in SOAP functionality in CFCs.
We had some high hopes this evening with the TalkShoe service but our dream of realtime participation from our listeners would go unrealized this evening. Despite our best efforts, the audio we were broadcasting to TalkShoe was of poor quality, to say the very least. We sincerely thank @cfaddict, @henrylearn2rock and @dfgrumpy (from CFHour() incidentally) for attempting to participate in our live stream before we threw in the towel! We’ll try it again another time!
Listen Now!
Direct Download!
Download It!
Loading ...
#1 by Chung on October 19, 2009 - 9:53 pm
Quote
I have to bite the bullet and try Eclipse already. I never tried it because of time and being stubborn. lol From CF Studio to Homesite and now Dreamweaver. I’ve even used MS Visual Studio to do my CF there for a while. I can’t stand Dreamweaver. It’s too top heavy but Homesite was getting way out of date and MSVS was mainly geared toward .net and asp.
I wouldn’t buy CF Builder though. I’m not the type of guy that uses all the bells and whistle. I barely using most of Dreamweavers features and to my dismay, don’t have the ability to “turn them off” to make the program less clunky.
I miss the days of CFStudio and Homesite. Simple and small and fast and able to quickly reference tags and functions.
If I had a choice, I’d go back to those two programs if it didn’t crash 80% of the time! lol Hell, I still use notepad to do coding when I don’t want to deal with Dreamweavers chunkiness.
So I’d pass on CF builder and when I get off my butt, probably be switching over to Eclipse if they are going to keep supporting it. I really don’t want to pay for anything that just going to slow me down like DW.
#2 by Dan Vega on October 20, 2009 - 6:16 am
Quote
ColdFusion Builder Beta 1 may of expired but Beta 2 was released at Max. You should download it as there are a ton of bug fixes / updates. I would give it another shot. There has been no mention of price so the number 250 that you are pulling out of the air is just rumors that you are hearing from the community.
#3 by Brian Carr on October 20, 2009 - 8:11 am
Quote
Thanks for the info Dan – I’m glad to hear that we can still work with Builder under beta evaluation at least for a little while longer. I myself got a little too used to working with it! I’ll be downloading beta 2 right away.
#4 by Glyn Jackson on October 20, 2009 - 8:15 am
Quote
First, love the show.
One thing I have to pull you up on is that you seemed to think CF Builder is released and cost £250? CF Builder is now in second Beta and has not yet been released. We have no idea what the price tag will be (if any).
If you are looking to retry CF Builder try the second Beta here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusionbuilder/
but done forget its a Beta lots of bugs and its not fast….yet.
#5 by Brian Carr on October 20, 2009 - 11:37 am
Quote
Thanks Glyn – glad you like it! Also thanks to you also for the CF Builder clarification along with Dan. I’ve already installed the Beta 2 Eclipse plugin and of course, it’s running like a dream (which is not bad for a beta). I’m very interested in finding out what the final licensing costs will be – keep us posted!
#6 by Johnny Thompson on October 21, 2009 - 8:05 am
Quote
….fyi….some of you fellow old-timers may recall “ColdFusion Studio” that came out with v.3.0., i believe. (enhanced greatly at 4.0 & 4.5). This later became Homesite+….and featured the ability to step through code with breakpoints and everything. It was sweet…and wonderful for debugging. I miss those days. Oh…and I also miss when rdp actually worked (something they abandoned when the server was ported to java). Anyhoo….I’m on a Mac now and Textmate is my IDE of choice (along with Coda & Eclipse). Thanks for the podcast – and keep up the good work. BTW – what are you guys using to put your podcasts together?
#7 by Johnny Thompson on October 21, 2009 - 8:06 am
Quote
…i guess i should read all of the comments. I appears Chung stole my thunder re: CFStudio.
)
#8 by Mike Chandler on October 21, 2009 - 8:19 am
Quote
I still have ColdFusion Studio 4.5.2 installed on one of my workstations, and I have Homesite on one of my laptops.
We’re using Skype to conference and then we piece together the audio (i.e. clip out the before and after chatter and add music) in Adobe Audition. It’s an older version of Audition because… well… I’m cheap!
#9 by Sid Maestre on October 21, 2009 - 10:06 am
Quote
Hey Guys!
Thanks for mentioning the upcoming ColdFusion DevCamp. We’ve got over 70 people registered and we’re making a push to get 100+.
Really enjoying the show. You should check out a ColdFusion conference this year. It’s def. NOT a celebrity-fest. I went to cfObjective() last year for the first time and spent the last night drinking beer and having pizza with Mark Drew, Sean Corfield, Peter Farrell (ColdFusion WeeklyPodcast), Adam Haskell, Bob Silverberg. They were presenters at the conference and a fun bunch. I won’t relay Jen Larkin’s story about a “Tenticle Porn” themed birthday party here, but needless to say it was funny.
Now that you are big name celebrities you should come out to a conference and sign some autographs.
My recommendation is cfObjective(). 400 or so developers. Great advanced material on ColdFusion with some Flex and AIR thrown into the mix.
Keep up the good work.
#10 by Tony Garcia on October 22, 2009 - 6:49 am
Quote
I just listened to the episode. Thanks for the great discussion on RESTful web services. I also wanted to comment on the IDE subject though.
Mickey — you seemed to be excited about the line debugging capabilities in CFBuilder. However you can already have that in Eclipse. When CF8 was released, Adobe also released it’s ColdFusion Extensions for Eclipse, which include various tools including RDS capabilities and a step debugger for CF. So you can already have CF step debugging without CFBuilder. (As I understand it, those plugins were integrated into CFBuilder). The download link for the plugin is here:
http://www.adobe.com/support/coldfusion/downloads.html#cf8devtools
And here is an article by Charlie Arehart on how to use the debugger:
http://www.carehart.org/articles/faqu_5_cf8debug.pdf
#11 by Micky Dionisio on October 22, 2009 - 1:21 pm
Quote
@Tony,
Thanks for those links. I’ve installed it and have been playing around with it this morning. Some initial thoughts.
Although it’s nice that there is some form of line level debugging, it doesn’t feel as rich as I’d like it to be. for example, to view a variable you must scroll/search for it in the variables tab. This seems tedious especially when compared to other IDE’s where you can mouseover a variable and boom, you’ve got all the details pertaining to that variable before and even after you step over it – state + properties included.
Would love to see breakpoint conditions where we can break only if a condition is met or a step further, hook in test assertions.
Also didn’t see an option to watch debug – the ability to change variables/call methods on the fly during breakpoints.
Will try it out for a bit more. Let me know of any time-saving tips or tricks when using this.
#12 by Tony Garcia on October 22, 2009 - 5:42 pm
Quote
@Micky,
To be honest, I’ve only used the debugger a little (I should be using it more). I haven’t worked with any other IDE’s so I can’t compare CF’s debugger to others. But the features you’re talking about sound really cool! Hopefully future versions of CFBuilder (and the Eclipse extensions) will include more rich debugging features, such as those you’ve described — specially if Adobe gets feedback and feature requests from the community. (hint…hint)
#13 by marc esher on October 28, 2009 - 8:43 am
Quote
Hey guys,
First time listener, first time caller. I just finished episode #4 last night. I’m diggin’ it! So much so, in fact, that I posted a review/response here: http://blog.mxunit.org/2009/10/this-week-in-coldfusion-episode-4.html
Keep up the great work, and I look forward to working my way back through the first 3 episodes and listening to the rest as they come out.
#14 by marc esher on October 29, 2009 - 7:43 am
Quote
Gents,
I wanted to ask Brian a question about something he said during the ReST discussion. Brian, you said that CF “natively” supports ReST in that all rest is is HTTP. But then you went on to say that grails and rails had “excellent ReST” support. Can you elaborate on what that means? if it’s “just http”, how is their ReST support superior, and does that change what you mean about CF’s support for ReST?
thanks.
#15 by Brian Carr on October 29, 2009 - 9:31 am
Quote
It’s an excellent question Marc. Bear with me, this could be a large post!
Before I start though, I should say that comparing CF to Grails really isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison as CF in this context is a programming language, and grails is an actual web framework built on top of the Groovy programming language.
You’re correct – my use of terms seems a bit contradictory, I suppose that I should have said that Grails / Rails provides facilities that make ReSTful web service deployment a little less wordy and a bit more intuitive without the use of any additional plugins or third party software.
This is most clearly illustrated in terms of ReSTful URL’s (which expresses an endpoint for a resource) and Representations – two very important concepts in the world of ReST. Grails provides a very straight forward approach to creating meaningful URL’s by generating a URLMappings.groovy file as a part of the application that allows developers to create custom URL’s that map to specific controllers and methods. Here’s an sample of what a static mapping in this file might look like;
“/product/$id” {
controller = “product”
action = “show”
}
A perfectly ReSTful URL (that’s straight from the documentation). The dollar-sign indicates a uri-variable who’s value is captured and provided to the target controller method. Of course, you can define any number of uri variables in a URL mapping. Grails also allows customization of these variables to be very granular – optionally providing regular expressions for each individual variable. As you can see, using only the native CF API (tags or script, doesn’t matter) and without using any third-party software, you would have to write a good amount of your own code to allow the configuration of, and parsing for such URL’s.
The same is true for Representations. Grails provides a very convenient set of converters that allow you to convert domain model information to meaningful representations in either JSON or XML – the syntax would look something like this (again, I pilfered this from the docs);
import grails.converters.*
…..
render Book.list(params) as JSON
render Book.get(params.id) as XML
With the serializeJSON() native CF API method, JSON representations are made much easier – but XML is a different story alltogether. Plus the Grails supported syntax again is very straight forward.
So as you can see, CF natively supports ReST in that you can get a handle on path-info for URL’s (as a part of the cgi scope), you can parse out provided request header information (for content-type negotiation and http authentication), you can return any information you like in the response header (via cfheader), you can create json and xml objects to return as representations – simply tying it all together is going to require more typing on the part of the developer when working with CF than with Grails with the caveat of not using third-party software.
I’m not the most skilled blog poster so I hope that this makes sense. I’m thinking I’ll provide my email address in the next podcast so if you have any other questions you can of course post them here or feel free to email me directly.
#16 by Micky Dionisio on October 29, 2009 - 10:19 pm
Quote
to all our listeners, when brian gives out his email address be sure to bust his chops about not being on twitter and/or facebook. mike and I can’t be the only ones doing it.
(sorry b – i had to)
#17 by Glyn Jackson on November 9, 2009 - 12:14 pm
Quote
Hi, I cannot wait until the next show….no really, I cannot wait!
when is the next episode due?
#18 by Brian Carr on November 10, 2009 - 7:47 am
Quote
Glyn, you’re too kind. Finding a time to record that fits everyones schedule has been quite a challenge this time around. We’re hoping to have the next episode completed before the week is out.
#19 by Johnny Thompson on November 20, 2009 - 11:11 am
Quote
i second Glyn’s question about the ‘next show’…please don’t go the way of the Dodo, or passenger pigeon, or cfweekly.
#20 by Micky Dionisio on November 20, 2009 - 12:20 pm
Quote
We definitely won’t! Recording scheduled for Sunday after 5pm