Trond Ulseth's Blog - Tool tips

Aptana with AIR support

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 06:10:00 -0600

I decided to upgrade to version 3.3 of Eclipse today. I went for a clean install, and then add the plugins I use. So after installing CFEclipse first (of course), I went on over to the Aptana website to get the Aptana plugin (which I mainly use for CSS), and there on the front page they announce that Aptana now supports AIR. I've not checked it out my self yet. Actually I took the time to write this post even before downloading the Aptana plugin. So go check it out your self at: http://www.aptana.org/air/.

Subclipse is awesome, and not difficult

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 02:28:00 -0600

I'm not a very advanced user of SVN, and up until now I've used TortoiseSVN as the client of my choice. However being that I now have a mac at home I needed to find a SVN client for OSX. However I could not find anything that looked as easy to use as Tortoise. I've been using (CF)Eclipse for quite a while, but for some reason I always thought that Subclipse is a advanced/difficult SVN client. However, realizing that I should probably learn it I decided to go ahead and (try to) use that on the mac. To make it short: It's awesome. It's every bit as easy to use as Tortoise, and the fact that you create a new Eclipse project as part of setting up your local working copy is one of those things that really makes it worth while. I've just scratched the surface of Subclipse yet, but it is the SVN client of choice for me from now on - yes, even on Windows machines. Some of you might be thinking something along the lines of "Instead of just going on about how easy and great it is - why can't he tell us how to use it?". Well my friends, I see no reason to, because there is already a VERY GOOD explanation available, and which is the one I used to get started. It's written by Aaron West and can be found at his blog. So Aaron, if you ever read this, Thanx a lot mate!

Tool tip: Anti Virus

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 07:35:00 -0600

I continue my journey to get the new pc in work installed with all necessities, and at the same time trying not to put to much into it. However, as this is a Windows pc (sigh), I need to put some anti virus software in there. There are several free ones out there, but my definitive favorite, and one that seems to go under the radar very often is Active Virus Shield. It seems to work well, not to slow down my computer (at least not noticeable) and has a nice UI (which is more than you can say about AVG). So if you're looking for free anti virus software - give it a try.

Handy little colorpicker

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 05:37:00 -0600

With a new computer in work I have decided to keep it as clean as possible, but sometimes there is software that you just need to have. Kinda like with Firefox extensions. So today I put my mouse pointer over the quick launch bar just to find that one of those essential little tools were missing. It's a color picker that I've been using for years, namely Pixie from Nattyworks. So if you need a color picker, you might want to check out this one.

Firefox extensions I can't live without

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 03:30:00 -0600

I just got a new pc in work (a Dell Precision M65 taking over for the older M50 - would have prefered a MacBook, but...). So after opening up Firefox there were clearly stuff missing there, I almost felt handicaped. So I installed all the extensions that I "need", in order to feel whole again. Without further ado, here they are: - All-in-One Gestures - Firebug - ShowIP - Tab Mix Pluss - Web Developer

Blog in Mac (and ftp tool tip)

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:04:00 -0600

I just had to make a blog post from our new home computer, a wonderful 24inch iMac. I have just hardly started to use it, and this is my first ever mac, but I really love how smooth everything is. Installing new programs, setting up wireless network, etc.. it's all so.. well smooth (to repeat myself). Also, I wanted to make a small update to the code of my blog, and needed a FTP client. I Googled around, and came upon Cyberduck. And this is a really smooth (there I used that word again - I suspect I will be using it a lot on this machine) FTP client. I really liked it. And it's open sourse and shareware. And also it supports SFTP (which we use in work). I've not yet done any development on this machine, so I'll get back to what I think about mac as a development platform.

CFCRemoteDocumenter - CFC Explorer replacement

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 08:39:00 -0600

Apparently this tool, written by Nathan Dintenfass has been around since 2003, but I only found out about it now (saw it here).

This is a great tool. On the servers we use in work (and the ones I use privately as well) the CFCExplorer is not accessible. With CFCRemoteDocumenter (phew - it cold use a shorter name) you cfinclude a cfm file into your component, and then open it in your browser with the following querystring at the end: ?method=getDocumentation

I like the idea of having one base class for all objects, since you then can have at least one common property for all objects: objectID (I learned this from working with FarCry). By including the CFCRemoteDocumenter in the base class it should/could be available for all classes. I did not try this yet though, but it would be cool if it worked.

varScoper

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 05:33:00 -0600

A post on Raymond Camdens blog talked about a tool by Mike Schierbert called varScoper.

The varScoper is a tool to identify variables created within a cfc's cffunction that don't have the corresponding "<cfset var..." statement.

I checed the online demo and must say that this looks like a very good tool indeed. This one goes into my toolbox.

Alagad Image Component

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 21:59:00 -0600

Yesterday I attended an online meeting with Doug Hughes presenting his Alagad Image Component and Alagad Captcha.

I must say that the presented functionality of the Image Component blew me (and pretty much everyone else attending as well) away. I've worked with several cfx tags for manipulating images, and none has been close to the ease of use, richness in functions or quality of result as Dougs cfc. Yes you read right. It's just a cfc. No dll file to install, no third party software to mess around with, just a plain cfc file. For just $75,- this is a steal for anyone in the need of working with images through their web site, intranet or other CF powered application.

The Captcha Component, which is a subset of the Image Component, was pretty darn nifty also.

At the end of the presentation Doug asked everybody to write in a number between 1 and 100, and the one coming closest to the number he had pre chosen would win licenses for both the components. I guessed 89 and the pre chosen number was 85, making me the winner of the license for these awesome products .

Eclipse

Mon, 09 May 2005 12:29:00 -0600

I don't remember quite when it was, maybe a year ago, I decided to check out CFEclipse. However, at the time I would compare it directly to Dreamweaver, and I found too many features missing from CFEclipse that I use daily in DW, and so did not bother to check it out further.

However certain circumstances recently made me install Eclipse and give it a new go:

The xml workgroup I'm participating in have started working with DocBook, and I wanted to check out the Vex editor plug-in.
There's been a lot of praise of CFEclipse in numerous blogs the last year.
I have decided that I will start learning Java (I've told my self that for a long time), but now I'm really going to do it (now that I've said it in public I'm kind of obliged). And since Eclipse also is a Java development tool, it was a natural choice. Watch out for a series of "Java for Newbies" posts as I go along.

The framework

So, now that I've installed it and used it for a while, What do I think of it? The answer is that I dig it. Any negative comments I might have, has to do with some of the plug-ins and not the Eclipse framework itself. The update feature, the project management, the incredible flexible layout functionality the ease of installing new plug-ins, in short everything with the Eclipse framework itself is just great.

The plug-ins

I started out with three plug-ins. The earlier mentioned Vex and CFEclipse (of course), and the XMLBuddy plug-in (after advice from my friend Jared).

I immediately found that the CFEclipse/XMLBuddy combination is KILLER when it comes to mach-ii development. XMLBuddy easily replaces XMLMarker which I've been using for xml config files from before. And for coding cfc's (the model portion of a mach-ii application) I already feel more comfortable than in DW (and I've been a DW user and fan for a LONG time). If now the Vex plug-in was any good I would be able to code and write my mach-ii tutorials within the Eclipse environment. Sadly I have to say that while not bad, the Vex plug-in can't compete with the freestanding XML Editor from XMLmind for authoring DocBook documents.

I've later also installed the SQLExplorer plug-in and the Eclipse WTP (Web Tools Platform). The SQLExplorer I've not been able to connect to my DB yet (due to my own stupidity maybe), so I can't say much about it yet (except that it is a bit hard to connect to your DB - if you are not smarter than me that is).

As for the WTP I found the CSS capabilities to be pretty good (not as good as in DW still), and combined with the browser view (I always have my local development projects mapped under localhost) I almost feel that it in time Eclipse can replace DW as web site/application layout/design tool. The other features of WTP I've not played around with yet.

As for the future I've already bookmarked about 30 plug-ins that I will test when time allows. The majority of these deal with XML, UML or DB interaction. One sure winners is the Poseidon UML plug-in, and I am also excited to see if the Clay DB modelling plug-in can replace DBDesigner 4.

I'll blog back when I have more to tell. If you have suggestions for plug-ins or good advice on the use of Eclipse please leave a comment.

Poseidon - a touch of class

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 23:15:00 -0600

Being one of the new religiously fanatic oop diciples in my ColdFusion development, I was looking around for a good program for planing my applications. I know a little (very little) UML, but basically I just wanted a program to plan my applications class library.

Armed with Google I went hunting for free UML programs to compare. After a few tries I found and installed Poseidon for UML Community Edition.

This is one of the best designed software I've ever tried. The interface is nice, intuitive and at the same time incredibly flexible. It's feature full without being bloated, it's clean without being simple. It kicked the competition into space (or at least out of my hard drive).

I only live to hope that someone someday will have the same feeling when opeing one of my applications for the first time, as I had with this. Awesome!!!

And before I forget. You can find Poseidon for UML Community Edition here. If you plan to use it for commersial purpose you should go for the standard, professional or enterprise version. The developers behind this product deserve to get paid - and I know what UML software I will bring to the table in work when the time comes for us to start using UML there.

Free database design program

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 13:14:00 -0600

Having a clean good overview over your database design is helpfull when you sit there and type inn all those SQL queries, and when you need to reference your tables and column names in your code. I used to rely heavily on the paper and pen method for designing and keeping track of my db designs. Untill one day I got sick of it (maybe I could not find one of the three pages with my db design that day - I don't remember). I pulled out the most powefull tool of them all, Google, and went at it. And behold, there was DBdesigner 4, a free product for database design. Mainly focused on MySQL, but a table is a table, and a collumn is a collumn. And since you can define datatypes your self - I don't see any reason why you should not use it no matter what db is your flavour. Ok - there is one valid reason not to use it - and that is if you have a comersial program for this task already. But if you only have the pen and paper - or slightly more advanced use the tables in a word procesing program for the purpose, you should have a look. DBdesigner 4 can be found at http://www.fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/.

Great free tool for configuring mach-ii.xml files

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 01:00:00 -0600

A xml file is just plain text, and could easily be maintained with notepad (or similar). However having the right tool for the job helps a lot (I guess most of you use DW, Eclipse, HS+ or something like that rather than notepad, for your cf development as well). Not being able to fork out for a profesional edition of XMLspy or similar, I deceided to try out the different free xml editors I could find. I ended up using a program called XMLmarker. And since I started with mach-ii I like it even more. Lacking several advanced features making it a bit short working with more advanced xml tasks it really shines through when working with configuration files Give it a spin. It won't cost you anything but some minutes of your time (which you quickly catch up when you start to use the program). The program can be found at http://symbolclick.com