Thoughts, ideas, tips, musings, and pontifications (not necessarily in that order) by Ben Forta ...
NOTE: This is my personal blog, and the opinions and statements voiced here are my own.
During the MAX keynote this morning I announced that we are working on an Eclipse based ColdFusion IDE codenamed "Bolt" to be released in conjunction with the next version of ColdFusion. More details to follow, but, visit Labs to request access to both Bolt and Centaur. Oh, and yes, the name "Bolt" pays homage to the original ColdFusion lightning bolt.
I would like to ask, in your opinion, comparing Adobe Dreamweaver and Eclipes which is better to code in ColdFusion? They both are Adobe's products and I have been using Dreamweaver for years. I code in ajax, DHTML, ColdFusion (in the process of learning FLEX 3). I just wondering why Adobe team would bring out a product that effects the sales for its another product line? Should I break my habit and start using Eclipes with ColdFusion built in?
Bolt sounds great - I hope that it solves the Eclipse problem with saving files with a UTF-8 BOM. If not please make put in a request to ensure Centaur use UTF-8 as the complier default - really why should anything else be the default. Adding cfprocessingdirective to everything is just plain ugly.
@Jonathan first, Eclipse and CFEclipse are not Adobe products. ;-) IMHO CFEclipse targets developers while Dreamweaver has some features that are more suited for desingers. I know, I know.. the wizzards, etc. But, to me Eclipse feels more like "coding".
@Johans not sure I understand... Eclipse can save files with UTF-8 BOM...
@all the features sound impressing, I just hope the new IDE won't be too expensive.
Cool news about Bolt. I hope that winds up being the product name and is not just a beta codename. It would be a shame if the cool name Bolt gets changed to something like Adobe ColdFusion/Actionscript Integrated Developer Environment Studio Workbench CS5.
I'm getting the impression that if you are a developer, you'll pay x dollars for Flex Builder and y dollars for ColdFusion Builder (Bolt). Is that correct? This seems to fly in the face of the Visual Studio approach with one tool, (i.e. one price) for multiple language development.
@Chris - Eclipse can read files that contain a UTF-8 BOM and yes you can set the workspace to use UTF-8 for the editor. However when you create new files in Eclipse it does not save them with a BOM.
Try this - save a test cfm file, say test.cfm, in Eclipse and then read it using a CF template with <cffile action="read" file="test.cfm" charset="cp1252" variable="str"/> and it should work fine.
Now create a new test2.cfm with DW or an editor that does support saving with a BOM. Update the cffile script to read test2.cfm and it will thrown an error - Error: Template. Cannot use the charset cp1252 because the file has a Byte Order Mark indicating it uses the charset UTF8.
I see what you mean. I just learned from another editor (TextWrangler) that you can save a file as utf-8 with or without BOM. It never occurred to me that Eclipse would save files without a BOM. On the other hand I never tried to read a file by using a charset that's intentionally set false. ;-)
Still I have not had issues with reading or processing utf-8 files even without cfprocessingdirective. For me it was always a matter of simply saving a file as utf-8 encoded.
@Chris - of course the charset is intentionally set incorrectly just to demonstrate the difference :-)
You may never have problems but when you least need it you may find that characters are not displayed correctly since unless there is a BOM or a cfprocessingdirective the CF complier does not treat the content as UTF-8.
The solution I came up with is a "BOM Writer" that adds/removes the BOM from specified files/recurses over directories. Reading the file with cffile removes the BOM, then just write the file again via java file I/O and add a BOM (wrting a file withcffile and charset="utf-8" does not add a BOM to the file. So I just run my projects through the BOM Writer.
I would like to ask, in your opinion, comparing Adobe Dreamweaver and Eclipes which is better to code in ColdFusion? They both are Adobe's products and I have been using Dreamweaver for years. I code in ajax, DHTML, ColdFusion (in the process of learning FLEX 3). I just wondering why Adobe team would bring out a product that effects the sales for its another product line? Should I break my habit and start using Eclipes with ColdFusion built in?
Sincerely yours,
Jonathan
Why not download Eclipse and CFeclipse and give the Eclipse environment a try?
first, Eclipse and CFEclipse are not Adobe products. ;-) IMHO CFEclipse targets developers while Dreamweaver has some features that are more suited for desingers. I know, I know.. the wizzards, etc. But, to me Eclipse feels more like "coding".
@Johans
not sure I understand... Eclipse can save files with UTF-8 BOM...
@all
the features sound impressing, I just hope the new IDE won't be too expensive.
Comment?
Listen to the community :)
Try this - save a test cfm file, say test.cfm, in Eclipse and then read it using a CF template with
<cffile action="read" file="test.cfm" charset="cp1252" variable="str"/> and it should work fine.
Now create a new test2.cfm with DW or an editor that does support saving with a BOM. Update the cffile script to read test2.cfm and it will thrown an error - Error: Template. Cannot use the charset cp1252 because the file has a Byte Order Mark indicating it uses the charset UTF8.
I see what you mean. I just learned from another editor (TextWrangler) that you can save a file as utf-8 with or without BOM. It never occurred to me that Eclipse would save files without a BOM. On the other hand I never tried to read a file by using a charset that's intentionally set false. ;-)
Still I have not had issues with reading or processing utf-8 files even without cfprocessingdirective. For me it was always a matter of simply saving a file as utf-8 encoded.
Cheers
Chris
You may never have problems but when you least need it you may find that characters are not displayed correctly since unless there is a BOM or a cfprocessingdirective the CF complier does not treat the content as UTF-8.
The solution I came up with is a "BOM Writer" that adds/removes the BOM from specified files/recurses over directories. Reading the file with cffile removes the BOM, then just write the file again via java file I/O and add a BOM (wrting a file withcffile and charset="utf-8" does not add a BOM to the file. So I just run my projects through the BOM Writer.