CFML IDE Survey Summary

April 30, 2008 – 7:13 pm

I finally found a bit of time to sit down and pull out some results from the CFML IDE survey:

393 Results (4/9 - 4/28)

1. Which of these describes your role best as a CFML user?
- Application Developer (172)
- Web Developer (129)
- Application Architect (60)
- Other included “superdude” and “all around scrub”

2. Which IDE(s) do you currently use for CFML development?
- CFEclipse (319)
- Dreamweaver (133)
- Eclipse (118)
- Homesite/CFStudio (91)
- Flexbuilder (82)
- Other - Aptana, Notepad++

3. What is your platform of choice for development?
- Windows (320)
- Mac (101)
- Linux (57)

4. Which features in your IDE do you most commonly/frequently use during development?
- Syntax highlighting of code (351)
- File Explorer (237)
- Help for CFTags/Functions (220)
- HTML editing (217)
- Source code control (205)
- CSS editing (160)
- Javascript editing (94)

5. How important are the following features for you in a CFML IDE?
Must Have:
- Syntax high-lighting of code (288)
- HTML editing (237)
- CSS editing (210)
- Javascript editing (199)
- Help for CFTags/Functions (193)
- Source code control (185)

Very Important:
- Integrated debugger (124)
- Framework Support (121)
- Intelisense on CFCs (114)

Useful:
- Integrated CFC explorer (161)
- Integrated log viewer (146)
- Integrated CRUD wizard (126)

Nice To Have:
- Integrated RDS data explorer (104)
- Customizable code coloring (83)
- Simplified Flex/Air development (71)

Unnecessary:
- Integrated CRUD wizard (71)
- Integrated RDS data explorer (50)
- Simplified Flex/Air development (31)

6. What in your opinion would be the right price range for CFML IDE?
- Under $100 (138)
- $100-500 (124)
- Free (109)

7. What features would you like to see added as one click install to an CFML IDE?
- Source control (294)
- XML tools (240)
- Documentation generation tools (220)
- Diff / compare tools (216)
- Unit testing tools (203)
- Other: “The ability to harness the magical powers of the internet.”

Still disappointed in the low number of results.  According to this recent article in Infoworld…

Adobe officials cited analyst estimates of 400,000 developers using ColdFusion

So 400 results seems a tad low.  So either people just ignored the survey, or there is a huge number of ColdFusion developers that don’t know about my blog :)  I’d love to know what kind of results Adobe got on their IDE survey.

By Jim | Posted in CFEclipse, Code, Open-source | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

John Resig on Accessibility, ARIA and Fire Vox

April 30, 2008 – 8:00 am

I’ve been using jQuery more and more at work but have been having to hold off some of the more advanced uses because of accessibility concerns. Working with the Government we are looking more and more at 508 and accessibility and right now AJAX is a bit of a gray area.

Today John Resig (author of jQuery) has a great blog post about Ajax Accessibility in which he discusses Google’s use of ARIA in Google Reader and also mentions  Fire Vox:

Fire Vox is an open source, freely available talking browser extension for the Firefox web browser. Think of it as a screen reader that is designed especially for Firefox.

In addition to the basic features that are expected of screen readers, such as being able to identify headings, links, images, etc. and providing navigational assistance, Fire Vox provides support for MathML and CSS speech module properties. It also works on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.

I’ll certainly be setting this up today to give it a whirl! If you are interesting in accessibility, 508, and AJAX I’d check out John’s post!

By Jim | Posted in Code, Tools, jQuery | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Two New Testing/Automation Tools

April 24, 2008 – 2:29 pm

I found both these over the weekend and they both look really interesting:

Cubic - from the same folks that make Selenium

CubicTest is a graphical Eclipse plug-in for writing Selenium and Watir tests. It makes web tests faster and easier to write, and provides abstractions to make tests more robust and reusable.

CoScripter - IBM(?)

CoScripter is a system for recording, automating, and sharing processes performed in a web browser such as printing photos online, requesting a vacation hold for postal mail, or checking flight arrival times. Instructions for processes are recorded and stored in easy-to-read text here on the CoScripter web site, so anyone can make use of them.

By Jim | Posted in Code, Tools | Tagged , | Comments (7)

The Savvy CMS - CFEclipse.org Makeover - Part II

April 23, 2008 – 8:07 pm

When we last left our Savvy saga we were facing installation.  Again the great documentation made installation a breeze and sums up the steps required nicely:

Savvy CM installation is very easy. There are no installation programs to be run on the server, instead you copy your files to the web server, modify the includes.cfm file with the correct information for your installation, register the database in ColdFusion, then upload your templates.

There are a few things you need to consider. Savvy includes an application.cfm file so if you are installing Savvy into an existing application (which is possible) you need to take some additional steps in order to allow the use of the Savvy application.cfm. Again these are outlined in details in the online docs.

Next you modify a file, includes.cfm, in which you define you datasource, some path information, site name and description and some other general settings.  Next you run a diagnostic utility which will check your configuration, verify your datasources and warn you if you need to fix anything. If all looks well you can then use the same diagnostic page to create your database.

The few glitches I encountered during installation and configuration were all covered in the documentation.

Once you have Savvy installed and configured the next step is to create a template!

By Jim | Posted in CFEclipse, Code, ColdFusion | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Hardy Heron Upgrade Complete! (Ubuntu)

April 22, 2008 – 7:09 am

Last night I decided on a whim to upgrade to the latest RC (release candidate) of Ubuntu called Hardy Heron (8.x).  It’s due to officially be released in a few days so I figured it should be fairly stable and I thought I’d beat the rush and upgrade now.   Usually I do these sort of things with little planning and last night was no exception!

  • No backup (rsync is sooo easy but really, what could go wrong?)
  • Started the upgrade right about the time a huge thunderstorm was overhead (computers love lightening!)
  • Forgot once again to backup my xorg.conf file (just in case)

The upgrade took about an hour.  Soon it rebooted my system and of course my monitors were all a mess.  Seems the NVidia drivers either didn’t get upgrade or got hosed.  Sigh.   Then I go to hit the Ubuntu forums (a great resource) and they are down for maintenance or something.  Ooops.

But I did find one post on the web that suggested trying Envy to load the latest NVidia drivers. I did that and things still weren’t right so I loaded up the package manager, uninstalled EVERYTHING NVidia related and tried Envy again.  This time I got nvidia-settings to run and from there it was just a simple matter of setting things up again and tweaking my xorg.conf file.   The only other thing that didn’t work was my sound for some reason but a quick search on the web and I found a few suggestions and after fiddling a bit I got it working as well.

I didn’t really have time afterwards to dig around and find out what’s new with the latest release but will hopefully have time to do that tonight after the TACFUG meeting!   Overall I’ve been very happy with Ubuntu but I do wish they could spend some time fixing the monitor setup issues.  That has been an issue during the last 2-3 upgrades.

By Jim | Posted in Code, Linux | Tagged | Comments (4)

Triangle Area ColdFusion Reminders

April 21, 2008 – 8:23 am

Busy week this week for Triangle Area ColdFusion users!!

Tuesday (April 22nd): Doug Hughes, President of Alagad Inc. presents on Patterns and Techniques for Data Persistence and Access at our local ColdFusion User Group (more details on the TACFUG site)

CFLunchFriday (April 25th): The first Triangle area CFLunch!! ColdFusion invades the Sunset Grille in Durham, about a half mile from the Southpoint Mall at 11:30. If you’d like to attend please RSVP by leaving a comment on the TACFUG blog posting here…

By Jim | Posted in CFLunch, Code | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Speaking Of Surveys

April 20, 2008 – 10:30 am

The recent web development survey has wrapped up with some interesting results.  Eclipse barely edges out Dreamweaver - 25% vs. 21%.  Pretty graphs!

By Jim | Posted in Code, Tools | Tagged | Comments (0)

What’s New With CFEclipse?

April 17, 2008 – 12:38 pm

Lots of good stuff going on in the CFEclipse community lately.  Development is picking up, there are lots of discussions going on about the future of CFEclipse.  Mark has released a few ‘bleeding edge’ examples using Aptana and Eclipse’s DLTK.

But you may not know that…

So I thought I’d share a few ways you can stay current:

  1. Join the CFEclipse mailing list (there are other lists available for developers, etc)
  2. Subscribe to the Trac RSS feed you can see what bugs are closed, open, wiki edits and more
  3. Subscribe to Mark Drew’s blog

Of course hopefully you are subscribed to my blog so I won’t mention that :)

By Jim | Posted in CFEclipse, Code | Tagged | Comments (0)
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