Web Trenches

Aptana released the 1.0 version of their Eclipse Plug-in (now called Aptana Studio for Eclipse).  I've been rejecting Eclipse (CFEclipse) as a viable IDE largely due to the show-stopping lack of ability to create a file on a remote FTP site.  This release overcomes that severe limitation.  You can now right-click on any folder in an FTP site, and select 'New File'.  This is an enormous productivity boost for developers who need to work on remote files.  The previous methods of synchronizing entire projects was terrible.  I've got more evaluation to do before I can switch to CFECLIPSE, but this is a great sign.

  

It's time to give CFECLIPSE another shot...

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Webucator recently made much of their ColdFusion training library openly available to developers at http://www.coldfusionmanualonline.com/

If you've never heard of Webucator, they are worth a look.   They offer training, both online and in-person, for a wide variety of Web technologies.  I took a DHTML session with them, and it was excellent. 

PS - Thank you to Pete Freitag for passing this along to our user group! 

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Since I started doing JavaScript and Ajax development I have always been frustrated with the lack of a good debugging tool for Internet Explorer.  Firefox has Firebug, which is outstanding.

I think I may have finally found a solution - http://www.debugbar.com/

This can be a big help for those Ajax calls and JavaScript functions that work in Firefox but just don't seem to work right in IE. 

Some of the features...

• See every Ajax request, the response headers, and the source code.
  
  
• View all the linked and inline scripts, html, and css in any loaded page.
• An enhanced JavaScript console
• HTML check - for validation

There are also some nice extras in there, such as the color picker, window resizing to preset sizes, and the ability to e-mail screen shots when an error occurs.

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I've been following the recent conversation about the tip posted by a blogger on how to "trick" the search stats on coldfusionbloggers.org.  Many people are upset about the fact that this was posted, but I think we should look at this another way.  More ...

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When Adobe released CF8, they touted the increased performance.  I've been using CF since 4.0, and I think this has been a claim for every release.  I assumed it was just a marketing ploy, as I haven't noticed a huge difference in past upgrades.  However, I am AMAZED at how much faster CF8 is than CF7. 

We have a very programming-intensive portal that is heavily used by pretty much everyone at the college I work for.  Its the access gateway to almost every Web system we have.  Prior to CF8, the average page processing time for the portal was about 700ms.   After CF8, it is down around 200ms.  While a half-second might not seem like much, the impact is enormous.  As a result, the rest of our site runs much faster.  If you multiply that half-second by the thousands of logins we get in a day, you can see how much processing time is saved.

Our whole site is noticeably faster, even at peak traffic times.  This boost alone makes the upgrade worth it.

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