CF Eclipse Nick Kwiatkowski Michigan State University, Physical Plant 8/8/2006

What is CFEclipse? An IDE for Coldfusion A plugin for the Eclipse Project –Eclipse is an open-source project started as a Java editor –Many platforms available, including Windows Active development…

CFEclipse History Founded by Rob Rohan in 2003 Oliver Tupman, Spike Miligan, Mark Drew, and Nathan Strutz join as active contributors… Macromedia / Adobe endorse project and help with RDS CFUnited 2005

Getting Started Installing Eclipse is very easy – there are two methods : –Unzip the Eclipse directory on your PC, and run ECLIPSE.EXE –Use the installer to customize your setup Only one requirement : –Java Runtime

Getting Started Eclipse Definitions : –Perspective: The Layout of your IDE –Views: A panel or tab within your layout –Workspace: The root of your projects –Project: Ahem. –Navigator: Shows all projects and files within your workspace.

Getting Started Tour of Eclipse

Getting CFEclipse Current (Stable) version: –Within Eclipse, go to the Help menu, and then select Software Updates, then Find and Install… –Search for new features –Add a new remote site with the following URL: –Click Finish and go through the install process.

Getting CFEclipse

The BETA version is much cooler. To get it you need to download the ZIP from Unzip the file to your eclipse directory, and do not overwrite any files. –There are some directories within the plugins folder. Just copy them to the eclipse/plugins folder, and your set!

Stable Release Features Tag Completion Syntax Highlighting Outline of Code Methods View Online Help Snippets File Explorer Methods View

Beta Features Dictionary View Toolbars Component Explorer

Customizing CFEclipse CFEclipse has MANY options, which includes the ability to modify its behavior. If you want tag-completion to mimic any other IDE, it’s easy! Window -> Preferences… –CFEclipse section –(Also check out the RDS section… more on that in a minute)

Customizing CFEclipse

Get RDS Support! While Macromedia said they would help with RDS support, they are not including it into the base install of CFEclipse. Two ways to get it: –Install Flex Builder –Download it from Ray Camendon’s Site (mirrored at our site as well)

RDS Support Once you get the ZIP file to enable RDS support, you need to unzip it within your plugins directory in Eclipse (similar to the Beta install of CFEclipse) Restart Eclipse to see the new plugin. Add the View to whatever perspective you are currently running.

RDS Support To add the view to the perspective, click on Window -> Show View -> Other… You will need to do this for every View you want to see.

RDS Support Next, you will need to setup your RDS (Coldfusion) servers within Eclipse. Go to Window -> Prefrences -> RDS Configuration Setup the parameters, per your configuration.

RDS Support

What RDS support gives you Datasource Browser File Browser SQL Editor / Visual Query Browser (like Access) Services / CFC Browser CFC Wizards for CRUD operations!

RDS Demo

Any Questions? Post them to our new list: –Send a message with SUBSCRIBE as the topic Or, me at