ColdFusion Builder Tour Notes (Part 2)

Although I've tried CFEclipse and ColdFusion Builder BETA, I always ended up reverting back to the old, outdated copy of ColdFusion Studio for 2 reasons. Neither of these advanced programs had a good batch search/replace and neither had keyboard shortcuts for commonly used HTML tags. Both of these issue were addressed last night:

RegEx Replace
Ben Nadel, one of pioneers in the language was also a CF Studio/Homesite user for the same reason. So fortunately, he wrote the RegEx Replace extension that does a better search/replace than CF Studio. There's a preview & commit since any batch processing can be dangerous. It also visually highlights the changes made so there are no surprised at the end. The only con is that it doesn't process multiple files or directories. But just having this extension available was a major factor for me in purchasing ColdFusion Builder. There's always potential for a future release to cover multiple files.

Keyboard Shortcuts
I can't live without keyboard shortcuts. I'm used to developing with the mouse and keyboard at the same time, so shortcuts are essential to productivity. Since ColdFusion Builder evolved from Eclipse and not the CF Studio/Homesite family, it lost the common shortcuts for HTML code. It's already second nature for me to hit CTRL+B for STRONG, CTRL+I for EM, CTRL+SHIFT+A for links, etcs. So I felt CF Builder was inefficient when all of these went missing. There are shortcuts for common CF tags, which balances things out. At the meeting, Adam Lehman also mentioned that an XML-based config file could be hacked for custom shortcuts. So I think I can add these back in... more updates when my copy arrives.

ColdFusion Builder Tour Notes (Part 1)

Presented by Adam Lehman
ColdFusion Product Manager
Adobe

March 23, 2010
NYU Medical Center
550 1st Avenue
New York, NY

Introduction
Adobe found that an IDE was more in demand than any other CF feature. It's something that always came up whenever they surveyed users. We didn't really have an official one since ColdFusion Studio since CFEclipse was from the community. Adobe saw IDEs as a way to attract new developers. It makes CF a legitimate, accepted language. A productive language needed a productive environment. Adobe is fully dedicated to this product as it has a rapid development roadmap:

• CB2 BETA by end of 2010
• CB2 = Storm
• CB3 = Thunder (will release before or at the same time as CF Server X)
• CFX = Link

Pricing
As expected, ColdFusion Builder sells for $299... the usual price for a basic Adobe product... same as Dreamweaver. It's worth every penny as there are a ton of productivity features packed into it. Additionally, FlashBuilder Standard is included with the buy. Both ColdFusion Builder and ColdFusion Server 9 are FREE for educational and non-profit organizations. Volume pricing and package deals are available.

ColdFusion Server 9
The most attractive selling point of the new version is performance. Without even converting to the new code, it's already 40% faster than version 8 and 6 times faster than version 7 right out of the box. CFCs also get a significant boost... 8x faster for creation and 3x faster for invocation. UUIC creation is a whopping 100x faster!

Office Integration
Previously, in order to get data from Oracle to an Excel spreadsheet, we would have to make a CF page with queries, save the output as HTML and open it up in Excel. CF9 allows us to go directly to Excel. Features include:

• generate PPT from HTML/CFM content
• create, read, update XLS
• XLS formulas
• visual formatting controls
• supports PowerPoint '97 through 2007
• supports OpenOffice.org

Productivity
The intelligence of the new code insight is a huge time saver because one previously had to open up Toad, SQL Developer or SQL*Plus to reference a table. Now, all of the fields show up as the query is typed in CFQUERY. It’s smart enough to pull them up even if the datasource is a variable! Other than CFM, the insight also works for SQL & JS. Tag Wizard allows users to display a form (for each tag) that contains all possible attributes.

ColdFusion Builder Tour

Adobe launched the long awaited ColdFusion Builder yesterday. As part of their tour, Product Manager, Adam Lehman presented tonight at the NY ColdFusion User Group. Notes coming soon!