The Eclipse Open Source IDE coupled with the CFML plugin, CFEclipse, has been embraced by the ColdFusion community for years. All of my sites were built with HomeSite and Dreamweaver. I was waiting for a good excuse to start a site from scratch in Eclipse. Three weeks later, I am loving the functionality, power and ease. The Kool-Aid is quite delicious.

I’ve long been an Ant enthusiast and advocate for its use beyond simple Java compilation tasks. A while back, I wrote a post, available in my InstantSpot archive, describing how I employ Ant to build and deploy web applications. It was intended to be the first in a series, but additional posts just never materialized for a number of reasons.....

Confidently unit testing code that relies on a database is troublesome. There are many different approaches and many opinions on the matter. I've previously written about using transactions to safely rollback the database after every test. This worked well for me at the time, but.....

I have been bugging Ryan Stille, Nebraska ColdFusion User Group Manager, about letting other user groups in the Omaha community (mostly Omaha Rails and Dynamic Language User Group) use his free NECFUG Adobe Connect account to record their meetings. Today he asked Adobe and was pointed to an existing FREE Adobe Connect registration for.....

I have been working on a little AJAX application using jQuery and ColdFusion using JSON to communicate with the page through components. One of the first things I needed to do was to maximize scroll position of a DIV element each time it was updated. Digging around I finally found what I was looking for.....

Selenium is an open source, simple web site testing and automation platform. I say it's a "platform" because it can't really be classified as just a tool, a language, API or a full application, but rather to a degree, all of these.......

A lot of development teams use Subversion for source control management. With Distributed Version Control Systems (DCVS) like Git, Mercurial and Bazaar gaining greater popularity, teams need to consider some what does it mean to migrate their existing centralized version control system to a decentralized one. This blog touches upon a few of those considerations.

"If you're still using HTML, JavaScript, complicated server deployments, and other technologies that don't "just work," try downloading the free Adobe Flex 3 SDK, a trial edition of Adobe Flex Builder 3 Professional, and the free developer edition of Adobe ColdFusion 8 to begin building better web applications with fewer headaches."

What a new software developer who learned ColdFusion on his first job thinks and struggles with...

Mylyn has changed the way developers work. This talk provides both an overview of the technology and a series of demos that will help newcomers get started. For seasoned users, the demos provide some quick overviews of new features and best practices. The theme of the talk is the idea that focus and flow are key to ............

This was my first attempt to combine regular expressions with cfhttp. It’s pretty handy once you get the hang to it, and it can be a very powerful combination. Here’s the script I use to scrape the total number of pages indexed in Google.

I've been involved with software development for over 12 years now. Over that period I've been a developer, architect and a project manager in different software projects. So the following list of 10 things relating to software development (and the key issue of software defect reduction) made a lot of sense. 1.....

Back in February I wrote a blog post on SQL Injection that included an example of how a malicious user might inject into a character field even though ColdFusion escapes single quote marks. The attack involved other forms of escaping single quotes - and was effective against MySQL. This week I stumbled upon (more like a train wreck) an attack that is much more sophisticated - and also involves injection into a character field. I am told.....

Does your development environment use coding standards, particularly around variable/method/file naming?

I like it when people email me cool stuff. Today Jon emailed me about adding his new project SvnTask to my Ant wiki. SvnTask is a super simple solution for using svn from ant. I just want a 100% Java solution that uses the nice svnkit library. Include two simple jar files and go.....

Scalability, OS, Other uses, Resources, Price grid

Fair warning though: once you've started using Mylyn, you never want to return to the old ways....

After upgrading to the new Eclipse 3.4 Platform I am pretty excited about a couple new features. This one is more of a time saver for me and some may not care but I really like it. We have about 10 servers here that I do direct development on (no source control, I know...) and I need a good way to organize all of my projects. What I do is create working sets ....

Similar to Nic Tunney’s Top 6 Underused ColdFusion Functions I figured I would post an Eclipse underused shortcuts for CFEclipse users. I think it was during a CFObjective presentation by Dan Wilson, I witnessed the copy down shortcut (ctrl-alt-down).......

I was looking for a way to programmatically refresh some specific folders in my workspace anytime I ran my ANT script. Eclipse provides several ant tasks that you can use for various purposes, once of which is the.....

I watched Qasim Rasheed's CFUnited presentation on Continuous Integration with SVN, ANT, CFUnit & Selenium. I picked up a fundamental concept, Conditional Execution, and a cool trick. The concept was the if and unless attribute of an ant target. I have read about them but it was great to see them in action. He covered it quick so I had to watch that section a couple times......

Wanting some light reading for this evening, I decided to dig into the Closures for Java draft spec (homepage). Oh. My. God. I'm a huge fan of closures. They're elegant, simple, and easy to use. Their semantics are subtle, but not confusing. They allow for very concise implementation of otherwise complicated algorithms, trimming a vast number of "normal" control structures, particularly various looping constructs.

Interesting article that discussed the possible next evolution of web apps.

ColdFusion 8 is arguably one of the most significant releases of the product since ColdFusion MX (6.0) first graced our servers in 2002. The release brings with it long awaited image manipulation tags and functions. Built-in AJAX integration makes it easier to create "Web 2.0" applications. Compared to previous releases, it's also wicked fast. Given the significance of these new features, it may be easy to overlook some of the enhancements that have found their way into ColdFusion 8. In this article by Charlie Griefer, we will look into the some of the enhancements to existing features and functionality that you may have missed.

I've put together an application skeleton for Mach-II 1.5 applications. This application skeleton is a nice way to get a Mach-II application up and running quickly. Neil Middleton, Peter Farrell, Matt Williams and Erik Meier each contributed in some way and Neil Middleton was kind enough to create an ANT task to automate the process The code has been contributed to the Mach-II group and should be available on the official site soon