Boyzoid's Blog & Stuff

I came across this link for a book being offered on Amazon. The book is about how the New England Patriots went 19-0 during the 2007 NFL season.  There is one issue though, they have not gone 19-0.  In order to do that, they must beat the New York Giants this Sunday in the Super Bowl.

Now, I am a Giants fan, so this is more of a slap in the face, but this is by far one of the most insulting things, towards a team, I have seen in professional sports.  Even worse than Jerry Jones putting 2 tickets in each of the Cowboys' lockers before the Giants beat them 2 weeks ago.

Seeing that Amazon is taking pre-orders for that book would make me cheer for anyone who would be playing the Patriots this week, even, dare I say, the Cowboys.

Go Big Blue!!

Todd Sharp has announced a contest for cfsnippets.com. The contest is quite simple.  All you need to do is submit snippets to cfsnippets.com, blog about the contest, or put a banner on your site/blog.

What are you waiting for?  Get going, I already have a commanding lead ;)

Yesterday, I discussed how to use FTP from with CFEclipse.  Its fairly easy, however, one issue is that you are editing files directly on the remote server, not the best solution in most cases.  A few people have asked if there is a way to synch a local CFEclipse (or any other) project with a remote server via FTP (similarto the way Dreamweaver FTP sites work).  I am happy to tell you that, yes, Virginia, there is a way to synch files on a remote server via FTP. A lot of this information was passed along by Phil Nacelli.

The first step is to create a new CFCeclispe project, in this example I named my new project 'FTP_synch'.

Next, right-click on the project and select 'Import'.

In the window that pops up, choose 'Other --> FTP'

If this is the first time you are importing into this directory (which in this example, we are), select the 'Choose a new folder to be imported' option.

Next we will need to specify what FTP 'site' to connect to.  You can choose a connection that already exists, or create a new one.  In this example, there are no other connections, so we choose to create a new one.

After clicking 'Next', fill out your FTP server information.

On the next screen, we specify what FTP directory to which we will synch our project. If you want to synch the entire FTP root, select the site, as shown below. (Kudos to anyone who can identify the directory structure below)

After selecting the directory and clicking 'Next', Eclipse will go out and connect to your server and  generate a list of files/directories.  On the next screen, you choose which files/directories you wish to 'import' into your project. In this example, we are grabbing all the files, so you can just select the top item.

Click 'Finish' and you will see that the files from the remote server are being downloaded to your project.  When it is completed, all the files you selected from the site will be on your local system.

Now, for the really cool stuff, you need to open the 'Synchronize' view.  To do this click 'Windows --> Show View --> Other'.  From the window that pops up, choose 'Team --> Synchronize'

You will now have the 'Synchronize' tab opened in CFEclispe perspective.  I am not sure where it will be, but in my install, the tab appeared in the bottom panel of tabs.  Inside this view, you should see something similar to the picture below.

This will tell you which files locally have been modified sine you last synchronized, or uploaded.

Make a change to one of your files in your project, and it will automatically appear in this panel.  In the image below, I added a CF comment to /www/index.cfm.  To compare the differences between your local, and the remote file, right click the file and select 'Open in Compare Editor'

One thing to be careful of is the 'synchronize' option on the context menu.  it doesn't act like you might think.  All it really does is check the server to see what files have changed.  To move your changes over, you need to either choose 'Upload' or 'Override and Uplaod' (or 'Override and Download' if files on the server changed). This is what will move files back and forth from the remote FTP location.

Once you upload, or download the files, you will notice that they disappear from the Synchronize View.  The cool thing is that this view only shows files that are out of synch with the server, or that have been modified locally.

I know of quite a few people who have not made the full leap to CFEclipse because it could not mimic the behavior of Dreamweaver FTP sites.  This shows that you can mimic this behavior, and maybe now others will start using CFEclipse all the time.

If we could edit Contribute templates, and have the changes propagate to files created with those templates, in CFEclipse, I could actaully uninstall Dreamweaver.

I have been using CFEclispe as my primary development IDE for ColdFusion applications for quite a while.  One nifty, yet in my case, rarely used, feature of CFEclipse is the ability to FTP to a site and add and edit files, similar to the way Dreamweaver used to work with 'FTP Sites'. I happened to be asked a couple of times recently if it can be done, and if so, how. So this will save me the time and energy of explaining again.

I had issues with the FTP functionality using CFEClipse 1.3 with Eclipse 3.1, so your mileage may vary,  The example shown below is CFEclispe 1.3.1.3 running in Eclipse 3.2.

First, Open Eclispe and go to the 'File Explorer' tab. If you don't see this tab, click 'Window --> Show View', and choose 'File Explorer View' under the 'CFML folder.

Now, in order to set up an FTP connection, you need to click the arrow the the right of the drop down box in the File Explorer View, and select 'Locations' (See image below)

Next, you need too specify you FTP connection information. Note in the image below, I have a connection named 'test', we will use this in the next step.

OK, so now we have our connection, we need to use it.  To do this, select the connection name from the drop down at the top of the File Explorer View, in my example, the connection named 'Test'.

Lastly, once CFEclipse connects, you can navigate the FTP site like any other directory structure tree.  Like HomeSite, the list of files in a directory is displayed in a separate panel under the directory tree. From there you can select files and edit them all you like.  To create a new file, simply right-click on the directory where you wish to add a file and select 'Create File'. You can also create new directories by right-clicking a directory and choosing 'Create Directory'.

Enjoy!

I am not sure if this is a function of Eclipse or CF Eclipse, but either way, its a great time saver.

OK, lets say that off of your web root, you need to create a directory structure that looks like /components/MyApp/user/data/gateway. You could keep doing right-click --> New Folder, until you were done.  Or, you could right-click on the parent folder for components, and in the dialog box that pops up, add, components/MyApp/user/data/gateway and Eclipse (or CF Eclipse), will create the directory structure for you.

Anyone else want to share some time saving tricks from Eclipse or CF Eclipse?