ColdFusion Builder. The Awesomeness of Refactoring

I've been using ColdFusion Builder since last Fall for all development work on a large ColdFusion-powered Flex application. All in all, it's been a good IDE since the public Beta 3 was released in December. However, what I was able to do today made the $299 I paid for the Flash Builder 4 Premium upgrade, which comes with CFB 1.0, worth every penny: Refactoring.

Here's the short scenario of why I was refactoring in the first place:
The application was initially built on ColdFusion 8 and the original CF developer created a file that gets included in most CFCs. This file contains a series of commonly used functions. However, we're currently in the process of migrating the CFML engine to Railo 3.1.2 and several of the functions in this utility file have the same name as functions in Railo 3.1.

For example, the original developer created a "dump" function to, well, dump messages or errors from within CFScript blocks. This function is scattered throughout the application (100s of references) and I need to rename it ( new name will be "_dump"). In the "old" days of CFML coding, this meant using the not-so-reliable project search and replace in Eclipse or manually going through each file and finding/replacing the entries. Well, not any more!

In CFB, I simply open the file in question and highlight the value of the name attribute of my desired function (dump). I then right-click on the highlighted name and select "Refactor -> Rename" from the context menu. Next, I enter the new name of my method (_dump) and am presented with two options: (1) preview all the changes CFB will make across the project or (2) select OK and let CFB run wild and make the updates. I tend to go with Preview first ... but only because I'm paranoid :).

I know that for other language developers (ActionScript, Java, etc.), this may be trivial, but, for us CF developers it's freaking sweet!

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Craig Kaminsky

@Fabien: Thanks for the feedback ... I never used refactoring in Flex Builder 3 and didn't realize it wasn't so good. Nice to know Adobe did an all-around better job with it this time :)!

Adobe Flex Tutorial

Hi,
wasn't trivial for AS developpers either as Flex Builder 3 did a really bad job at refactoring (crashed most of the time and didn't impact references).
This is now fixed in Flash Builder 4 for AS, thanks Adobe :P

Fabien
http://www.flex-tutorial.fr

ColdFusion Builder. Minor Annoyance and Fix

Over the past week, since switching from using ColdFusion Builder as a plug-in to the stand-alone version, I've noticed that every time I started ColdFusion Builder, the application window would maximize across my screen. This drives me nuts because my main computer has a large screen and high display resolution ... I don't need that much ColdFusion when I code :).

I looked throughout the preferences for a setting but found none. I also ran some obligatory forum and web searches but, still, didn't find anything useful ... hence this post.

Manually Set the Stand-alone Version of ColdFusion Builder's (read: Eclipse's) Application Properties.

Start ColdFusion Builder.
Set the application window to the width and height you'd like to keep.
Close ColdFusion Builder.
Open your workspace directory (on my Mac, the default went to /Users/<username>/Documents/Adobe ColdFusion Builder workspace/).
Show your hidden files (if necessary, which it is for me on my Mac!).
Open the .metadata folder.
Open the .plugins folder.
Open the org.eclipse.ui.workbench folder.
Open the workbench.xml file.
Edit line 4 (that's the line number in my file but, more importantly, the line contains an XML element with the following: window height="1055" maximized="true" width="1824" x="33" y="47").
Change this element by either removing the maximized attribute altogether or change it's value to false (i.e., window height="1055" maximized="false" width="1824" x="33" y="47").
Save the file.
Open ColdFusion Builder.

You should now be able to maintain your desired window's width.

NOTE: This issue may only be on the Mac (or maybe it's not an issue at all!). I don't have another machine on which I can test ColdFusion Builder. And I have filed it as a bug with Adobe, just in case!

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ColdFusion Builder. Servers View Issue

This may not be relevant for many but it was for me and I thought I'd share.

In ColdFusion Builder (CFB), you can use the Servers view to control your various CF server instances. My install of CFB has 3 local servers setup: ColdFusion 8, ColdFusion 9, and Railo 3.1.2. CF8, the one I had some trouble with, was installed on top of JRun4 using the multi-server configuration option.

Before CFB, I started CF8 with an AppleScript: 'do shell script "sudo /Applications/JRun4/bin/jrun -start cfusion &" user name "myusername" password "mypassword" with administrator privileges'. With the release of CFB, I wanted to start controlling (starting, stopping, restarting) all my servers from the IDE because you get some added benefits that you do not get if you start/stop your servers outside the IDE: including but not limited to TailView on the logs and a really nice set of debugging options.

However, whenever I started my CF8 instance from CFB, the IDE could not access the log files. I could see output in the Console view indicating that there was an error with the RDSServlet (Permission denied for the requested operation). Specifically, CFB was not able to access the log files (permission denied) and the error message looked like:

[ColdFusion 8 (cfusion8)]:Error(date/time) Unable to fetch server mappings.
[ColdFusion 8 (cfusion8)]:Error(date/time) Unable to get the log directory.

In order to fix these issues, I made a few changes to both my CF8 server and CFB:

Added a dedicated user for ColdFusion 8 via the CF Administration and gave this user both RDS permissions as well as Administrative Access for the Console & API.
Set CFB to access ColdFusion RDS features as this newly created administrator (accessed either via the standard Window->Preferences->Adobe->RDS Configuration or by right-clicking on a server in the Servers view and selecting Edit Server from the context menu).
Set the permissions on my ColdFusion logs folder and its files (/Applications/JRun4/servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/cfusion-war/WEB-INF/cfusion/logs) to a more open setting. I believe I used chmod 666 but I forgot :).

With those three changes in place, I was then able to start, stop and restart my CF8 instance from CFB with no problems in terms of accessing log files and, most importantly, being able to take advantage of the TailView to see my logs actively update as I ran tests and such.

Like I said at the top, this 'issue' may not be widely experienced or might be something in how I installed CF8 and/or started it with administrator privileges from my AppleScript but, just in case others have run into this problem, I thought I'd post what I did in the hopes that it might save someone a few hours of time!

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ColdFusion Builder. The Awesomeness of Refactoring

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ColdFusion Builder. The Awesomeness of Refactoring

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