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The Ultimate ColdFusion Tools List


Thread posted 03/31/09 by Abhijitmazumdar last edited 04/01/09
8,443 views, 1 comments.

Title
The Ultimate ColdFusion Tools List

Content

All of us use applications for our day to day work, and inevitably, we will all be using slightly different apps to solve the same problems. These apps may or may not perform better than whatever you are using at the moment (or you may not even know a tool is available). The aim of this list is to try and publish a list of what’s out there and hopefully you’ll find it useful by exposing tools to you that you didn’t know was already available.

 

Coding Tools (IDE’s, Text Editors etc)

- Eclipse The big one. This IDE is the source for a whole host of other plugins that developers can use for pretty much whatever they want. It requires Java, but it can do pretty much anything under the sun.

- Notepad++ A lightweight text editor, similar to the likes of EditPlus and e that is based on the Scite codebase. Notepad++ is built on the same fundamental codebase as Notepad2, and includes tabbed editing and more language syntax highlighting. Is

- TextMate (Mac Only) Textmate is the king of lightweight text editors in the world of OSX. Working with a bundle mechanism that helps it support pretty much anything under the sun, this is a massive tool with the Rails developers out there. For a demo take a look at some of the rails screencasts knocking about on the internet.

- e Touted as the Textmate for Windows, which is where e obviously draws some inspiration. A nice lightweight programmable text editor.

- Homesite / ColdFusion Studio The old favourite. Bundled with other tools such as Dreamweaver MX, this is where we were when the author of CFMX also did a IDE for CFML. Now we have nothing (official). If you can find a copy, give it a go.

 

Coding Tool Add-ons

- CFEclipse The Daddy. If you are a CFML developer, CFEclipse is the first place you should look for a CFML centric IDE. There is not much that is worth doing that this plugin cannot already handle. Combined with SnipEx, this makes for a pretty unbeatable tool. Big thanks to Mark Drew for this.

- CFTextmate CFTextmate is a ColdFusion bundle for Textmate and e providing CFML tag support, and completion plus a whole load more planned.

- Aptana Aptana is a “free, open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused editor and development environment for building Ajax applications. It features code assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, FTP/SFTP support and a JavaScript debugger to troubleshoot your code.” Enough said…

- FusionDebug FusionDebug enables developers to debug their ColdFusion programs by setting breakpoints, stepping into tags and CFCs, examining the contents of variables and more…

 

Browser Extensions

- Firebug (Firefox) If you haven’t heard about Firebug, pack your bags and go home. Arguably the most powerful in-browser IDE available. It’s a complete x-ray into your browser including HTML, CSS and JavaScript, all live on the page. A must have.

- Web Developer Toolbar (Firefox) If you’re the last developer to download FireFox, or you’re holding off, WebDeveloper is a solid reason to switch to FireFox NOW. It’s amazing and has to be used to be believed. It consolidates at least 2 dozens useful functions for those who sling CFML or HTML. And if you’re a CSS person, the realtime CSS editing is pretty hot.

- QuickFrame (Firefox) Allows quick access to frame functions via the context menu by overriding “Reload”, “View Page Source” and “View Page Info”. Instead of being applied to the main window, those functions now do the same as the corresponding functions in the “This Frame” submenu, which is the a intuitive “context” for the context menu.

- YSlow (Firefox) YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool. YSlow gives you: Performance report card,HTTP/HTML summary, List of components in the page and Tools including JSLint.

- ReloadEvery (Firefox) Reloads web pages every so many seconds or minutes. The function is accessible via the context menu or via a drop down menu on the reload button.

- Coldfire (Firefox) An extension to Firebug. It provides debug information in a FireBug tab as opposed to the bottom of the page. This lets you debug and keep your site layout intact, since ColdFusion’s built-in debug information can sometimes mess with your site layout.

- ColorZilla (Firefox) Very handy Firefox extension, which places a Colorpicker /Eyedropper in the corner of Firefox browser. Find color codes from any webpage or image, easily.

 

Code based tools (Frameworks etc)

- CFUnit CFUnit is a unit testing framework for ColdFusion (CFML), modeled after the popular JUnit framework. The idea behind unit testing it to build a framework of scripted tests that are frequently executed to verify each method or function behave as expected.

- CFCUnit A full-fledged framework for unit testing ColdFusion code. It is part of the xUnit family of unit tests, and is based on the API of the JUnit framework for Java.

- MXUnit MXUnit is a unit test framework divided into 2 major parts - The MXUnit Test Framework and the Eclipse Plugin. Once you get your feet wet with the framework and the basics of testing, you will want to make it more convenient by using the plugin. The plugin allows your development to be very cohesive with testing.

- Model-Glue Model-Glue: ColdFusion is designed to make it easier to use object-oriented models to create HTML-based applications. It enforces Model-View-Controller design, eases implicit invocation, does repetitive work for you, and plays well with other open-source ColdFusion frameworks.

- Mach-ii Mach-II is a powerful, object-oriented, open source MVC framework for ColdFusion that focuses on easing software development and maintenance. Mach-II was the first object-oriented framework for ColdFusion and continues to innovate with new features designed to help ColdFusion developers build and maintain large-scale applications more easily.

- Fusebox Fusebox is the most popular framework for building ColdFusion and PHP web applications. “Fuseboxers” find that the framework releases them from much of the drudgery of writing applications and enables them to focus their efforts on creating great, customer-focused software.

- Reactor Reactor is an Object-Relational Modeling tool which generates database abstractions on the fly, as needed. Reactor is sometimes called an “Inline Dynamic Database Abstraction” API. In simpler terms, Reactor is used to generate ColdFusion objects which are used to access data in your database. Depending on Reactor’s configuration, these objects are recreated as your database or configuration changes. Reactor accelerates development by automating much of the repetitive, tedious and error-prone work involved in creating an Object Oriented database abstraction layer.

- Transfer Transfer ORM’s main focus is to automate the repetitive tasks of creating the SQL and custom CFCs that are often required when developing a ColdFusion application. Through a central configuration file Transfer knows how to generate objects, and how to manage them and their relationships back to the database.

- Coldspring ColdSpring’s core focus is to make the configuration and dependencies of your CFCs easier to manage. ColdSpring uses the “inversion-of-control” pattern to “wire” your CFCs together. Inversion-of-control provides many advantages over traditional approaches to assembling your application’s model. Also part of ColdSpring is the first Aspect-Oriented-Programming (AOP) framework for CFCs.

- Coldbox ColdBox is a proven event-driven CFC based ColdFusion Framework, specifically designed for high availability web applications. It provides you with a set of reusable code and tools that you can use to increase your productivity, and it provides you with a development standard that comes in very handy when working in a team environment. It makes use of an MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern implemented via CFCs and an extensive array of patterns for its operations such as Factories, Helpers, Workers, etc.

- Illudium PU-36 Code GeneratorThis project generates ColdFusion components (i.e. bean, DAO, gateway, service), ColdSpring XML, Transfer XML, and ActionScript Value-Objects using the admin api and database introspection. The front-end is built in Flex 2. The code outputted for easily pasting or saving into a project to allow you to get a head-start on some of the grunt work of doing OO in CF. It uses XSL to generate the components and is designed to allow you to easily add to or modify the generated code. You can even create new templates that can be swapped out at run-time.

 

Source Control

- Subversion Subversion is a free/open-source version control system. That is, Subversion manages files and directories, and the changes made to them, over time. This allows you to recover older versions of your data, or examine the history of how your data changed. In this regard, many people think of a version control system as a sort of “time machine”. Subversion can operate across networks, which allows it to be used by people on different computers. At some level, the ability for various people to modify and manage the same set of data from their respective locations fosters collaboration. Progress can occur more quickly without a single conduit through which all modifications must occur. And because the work is versioned, you need not fear that quality is the trade-off for losing that conduit—if some incorrect change is made to the data, just undo that change.

 

Quality Control

- Selenium Selenium is a test tool for web applications. The tests are written as HTML tables and can be run directly in most modern web browsers. Selenium can be deployed on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh, making it one of the most portable testing frameworks. Selenium was developed by a team of programmers and testers at ThoughtWorks. It is open source software, released under the Apache 2.0 license, so it can be downloaded and used without charge.

 

Miscellaneous

- CFQuickDocs The place to get your CF documentation. A great AJAX search of tags and functions and then speedy loading of the relevant documentation page. Supports CF7 and CF8

- AutoHotKey Autohotkey is an OS add on that lets you configure your keyboard for new and interesting things. Automation, hot key control, remapping etc.

- BeyondCompare Beyond Compare is an advanced file and folder comparison utility for Windows, helps you visualize changes in your code, keeps your directories in sync, and validates copies of your data.

- Ant Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes. It is similar to make but is written in the Java language, requires the Java platform, and is best suited to building Java projects.

- Windows Grep Windows Grep is a tool for searching files for text strings that you specify. In addition to searching, Windows Grep also performs global replacing in your files, with complete safety. Windows Grep is designed for searching plain-ASCII text files, such as program source, HTML, RTF and batch files, but it can also search binary files such as word processor documents, databases, spreadsheets and executables.

- SeeFusion SeeFusion is a utility for monitoring and troubleshooting ColdFusion application servers. SeeFusion gives you the ability to “see” how your ColdFusion servers are processing requests in real time.

Comments

posted 06/02/09 by Inthrakumar | Report Abuse

<p>This is gr8 info dude.</p>