I was working on some code today in CFEclipse, and I had to edit a .js file. Turns out, unless you like editing your JavaScript files in black and white, you need to add a plug in for that too. I did a Google search and there are a whole bunch of JavaScript plugins out there. One of them caught my eye though because it was from our friends at Adobe Labs. http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/jseclipse/

I installed it easily and now my .js files are nicely color coded. Hooray

One of the first things I noticed on CFEclipse when I opened my first CFML template was that I really, really, really did not like the bright purple that was used for the HTML table related tags.

I don't know about you, but as far as I'm concerned table tags are supposed to be green. Seems like common knowledge to me. Perhaps some people enjoy seeing little purple td tags burned into their retinas so they can see them with their eyes closed, but it's not for me.

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So I started to install CFEclipse this morning, thinking I would be done in about 10 minutes, which I could have... if I new what to do. It was difficult to figure out what to do exactly because the documentation is somewhat hard to find... it's all spread out across various blog entries like this one. Here are some basic instructions on getting started.

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I have been hearing a lot of Hype for along time about how great CFEclipse is, but I have been using ColdFusion Studio/HomeSite+ for over 9 years now and I've never had any desire to change. I am a creature of habit. I am one of those people who will go to the same restaurant all the time, and with every visit, I read the whole menu thinking I will try something new this time. Then, when the server comes to take my order, I still always order the exact same meal I got the last 200 times I went to that restaurant.

So why am I deciding to change now, you ask?? Well there a 3 main reasons why.

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There are many new AJAX functionalities included with CF8 and I am going to start to share some small things I have found useful. I will title these blog entries so they all start with "CF8 AJAX Features".

This first example shows a page that is using cflayout area "left" to display an html cftree that contains a hierarchical structure of categories (this could also apply to a page/sub page navigation system if you wanted to use cftree for that) and a cflayoutarea "center" that displays the child categories of the selected tree node.

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I have done a lot of work with PayPal's api over the years, and one of the biggest frustrations I had for a long time was that their ColdFusion support was limited. In the more recent versions of their API they have provided the ColdFusion development community with a CFC that interfaces with their Java API.

Then, when they dropped the requirement for a client-side .P12 certificate to be passed with each request as the only way to authenticate against their api, and added the option to use a signature string instead, they got close to a useful solution for the average CF developer.

The only thing that still causes many ColdFusion people to cringe and pull their hair out, is the fact that the PayPal.cfc returns a java object, which is something most CF developers don't deal with on a regular basis (if at all).

Fortunately for you, I have already taken the time to go through each of the API calls, and through the use of many cfdumps, I found every piece of information available in each of the responses, and then I put them into nice CF developer friendly ColdFusion structures.

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I had a hosting provider recently ask me if there was a way to automatically remove disabled or expired scheduled tasks without having to go through the ColdFusion administrator, because he had many servers and each server had many scheduled tasks so it would have been a pretty large chore to maintain this manually.

ColdFusion scheduled task information is stored as WDDX in the file cfusionmx7lib eo-cron.xml

Below is the script I created that will cleanup the neo-cron.xml.

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