Two CFBuilder tips
I am liking CFBuilder (CFB) more and more as I get used to it. I have been using CFEclipse for a few years now, so I was already pretty happy with CFB. But I keep finding new things that improve my approval.
I am a bit anal about removing extra white space. As we develop, it is normal for lots of extra spaces and tabs to appear on blank lines, and at the end of lines. CFEclipse has an option to automatically remove extra white space when you save the file. I noticed that CFB was not doing this, but I couldn't find an option to turn this on. Well, today I found it (by accident). Click Window->Preferences->ColdFusion->Editor Profiles->Editor, and then check the "Trim spaces before saving file" option. :)
Another thing I found that is cool is a feature that I thought was missing from Dreamweaver. When coding ColdFusion in Dreamweaver, if you type in '</' Dreamweaver will search for the nearest unclosed tag and automatically close it for you. So if you start a cfif block, type a bunch of code, and then type '</', Dreamweaver will finish the tag for you, '</cfif>'. I thought that CFB didn't have this feature, but today I found that it does. The catch is that there is a delay. If you want to use this feature, type your '</' and then wait a bit, and CFB will close the tag for you. I searched in the options for a way to speed this up, but I couldn't find it. That's Ok, at least the feature is there.
Jake Munson
37 Yrs old
Rob
If you don't mind me asking, what were you using before? In reading blogs and mailing lists, it seems that people that were not using CFEclipse (or Flex Builder) before are not happy with CFB. But I've found that with any editor (or IDE) switch it just takes time to get used to it. In the end the things that you "hated" about the new editor aren't as big of a problem anymore.
I was using CFEclipse, I can completely understand a great number of people complaints but we need to all bare in mind that it's in BETA at the moment. I think the syntax highlighting could be better, it's ALL read and blue at the moment, would like to see something a little more varied, especially when it comes to SQL inside query blocks and things.
I've also had a couple of speed glitches where it goes REAL slow and takes a few moments to catch up with what I'm writing, however on the whole I find it pretty good.
The fact that the syntax dictionary is accurate is a real plus, I used to find that CfEclipse would tell me my code was invalid when in fact it was perfect.
It's a work in progress for sure, but I have no doubts that as they ween out the bugs and people start creating some exciting extensions things will really kick in. I also love the fact that it's stand-alone and a plugin, giving all the cool features to non Eclipse users.
Rob
I was thinking that if I'm in my UserService, for example, and I instantiate my RoleService like so:
rs = createObject("roleservice").init();
and then type "rs" DOT, I would have all the methods from the RoleService object displayed for me to choose from. I'm definitely not seeing that. I am seeing it inspect the arguments scope and some other things, but so far I haven't seen the true intellisense I was hoping for.
What have your experiences been?
Thanks,
Brian
I like how it can minimize all cffunctions upon opening a CFC, so nice.
And CFEclipse is still snappier overall.
If you type </ and invoke code assist manually (by pressing CTRL+SPACE), the completion tag is inserted for you, so you don't have to type the closing tag OR wait for the delay.
BUHLER