Digital Ninja

I'm sure this is information you can get just about anywhere, but the assumption that everyone knows about it is silly.

I loaded up a file in CFEclipse just now and I got the little red "X" on the left margin of my cfstoredproc tag. For some reason I don't have the ColdFusion 8.0.1 dictionary loaded on this machine. I could have gone searching for it and all that, which might well have been just as easy, but instead I felt compelled to manually edit the dictionary file. If for nothing else, it was a good exercise.

Just so you all know, the dictionary files are here:
C:\Program Files\eclipse\plugins\org.cfeclipse.cfml_1.3.2.200901041029\dictionary

Now, of course, the exact path might change based on your preferences and version of CFEclipse. In this directory there is an XML file for each dictionary, and all are loaded up when CEclipse starts. I recently downloaded the XML dictionary for ColdExt (that'll be another blog post before long, I hope!) and dropped it in here.

So, to complete my thoughts for this post, I went into the cf8.xml file and copied the cachedwithin and cachedafter parameters from the cfquery tag to the cfstoredproc tag. After a restart of CFEclipse, WHALA! No more little red "X". Now you know, and that's half the battle!

Lately I find myself documenting everything - I mean EVERYTHING. We're about to start a new hire at the office so I'm documenting my pants off there. I'm hitting another development run real hard for my freelance client, so I'm filing issues into Project Tracker like it's going out of style. In all this commotion I find myself looking at some of the recent offerings life has in the way of screen capture. I'll list just a few of them.

Firefox Based

I found these two nifty add-ons to Firefox that look to be worth trying out. I haven't installed them yet, though, because I have a lot of things going on in my Firefox tabs right now. So that will have to wait. :)

• Capture Fox
• ScreenGrab

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Web Browser Based

This one really gets me. I've had my head in the sand for a little while, and here I come up for air and web pages are now performing video screen capturing! While it's true I'm usually just in the market for a still shot capture, this one blew me away and urged me to spread the word.

Go check out Screen Toaster. You can record your primary display to an AVI or SWF and even annotate it in real time or add audio after the fact. I feel some serious "Tutorials By Adam" coming along soon. Did I mention this is a free service/tool?

Another recent newcomer - and made in CF I believe, by Todd Sharp - is Slide Six. This is also browser based but is also friendly and open to imports from all manner of sources, meaning I can repurpose my existing media and assets. I'll have to dive into this one to do a full evaluation. Screen Toaster sounds like it has less production over head, but Slide Six appears to slam the toaster into the floor with feature richness. Also free!

More to come...

I'm still evaluating all of this. In a way, this blog post is for myself so I can remember my research. There's only so much use and organization I can get out of my Delicious book marks!

BTW - if you comment, please be patient with my response. I still haven't gotten around to adding in my smtp authentication into the MangoBlog's notification piece, so I have to check back here. Sorry!

My goal with this blog is to help other folks find the tools and tricks that help me so much. Here's one that I'd like to plug. It's a project I found on RIAForge called Deployment Builder. It was made by the hands of developers (Rob Brooks-Bilson and Adam Crump are involved) doing exactly what my team and I are trying to do, which is ease the deployment process for projects from the source code repository to any environment, whether it's staging or production.

There are two things that might make you hesistate, if my guess is right. The first is, "that's a lot of power to put into a tool/application." You're right for thinking that. The fine folks who built this tool have jumped through some sophisticated hoops to make it very well secured IMHO. I endorse their efforts and applaud the result. Being that it's installed, not hosted out there somewhere, I feel very comfortable with the product in this regard.

The second question I'm guessing you'll ask is something like, "My infrastructure is complicated - it would be a nightmare to configure this into an application!" Yes, you might be correct here. I found, however, that this application will take you at least 60% there, depending of course on where "there" is. For me, "there" was telling Deployment Builder the tag in SVN I want to deploy, the server (configured as a name and FTP host) I want to send it to, and then click "GO".

Nothing will replace the human factor here, but I see a dramatic speed increase coming now for the team and an increased "nimbleness" entering play that will allow us to juggle entire versions of products we're staging, testing, and pushing to live. No, I still don't have my one button trigger to get that OneHugeApp(TM) onto the load-balanced ColdFusion pool, but I can in just a few clicks anyway. It's a start.

And it's open source, which means perhaps we can contribute to it to help get it where it needs to be to make those kinds of things happen in one click. My motto lately has been the constant mantra, "there is no original problem." Finding this tool was a reassurance of that mantra.