Month: November 2009

Continuing on my quest to find cool and unusual ways of extending ColdFusion Builder, I stumbled onto this Rube Goldberg contraption of an extension. It came about due to severe jet lag in Sydney and a need to do something cool for cf.Objective ANZ.

So imagine you’re a freelancer who is no longer in an office, able to get instant feedback on a piece of code. I know the feeling. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could do that through the IDE? Well this extension will do that. Highlight a piece of code in your editor window, right click, and choose Instant Code review. A list of your currently online buddies will pop up, and you choose them and write out a comment. Your code and comment will be sent via IM. Your IM buddy can respond to it. That response will get written as a comment in your source code above the selected code. And just because I can, if you are on a Mac, the extension uses text-to-speech to creepily tell you “Your instant code review is done.”

So what’s going on here? Behind the scenes I have an IM event gateway running. You remember event gateways; we added them in ColdFusion 7. They allow you to have ColdFusion be an IM or SMS client among other things. I use that gateway to take code from the IDE and pass it along to your IM gateway. The gateway can also listen for IMs. When it receives the response from your friend, it uses a locally written queue file to match up the response with the file that generated the code review request.

Don’t take my word for it, here’s a video demo.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7706690&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

ColdFusion Builder – Instant Code Review from Terry Ryan on Vimeo.

Now I don’t see this as a completely useful extension. It’s cool, but it might just be a bit flashy. But I wanted to highlight that despite the fact that we added a lot of features to ColdFusion 9, it still has all of the coolness of previous versions.    

Like what you see? Then check it out at RIAForge: Instant Code Review ColdFusion Builder Extension.

Thanks to Raymond Camden who endured testing this application with me, and spammed his buddy list because of it.

I got some great advice yesterday telling me that I really need to show this extension in action. So I did a little screencast. Check it out.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7688122&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

ColdFusion Builder – Google Language Tools from Terry Ryan on Vimeo.

I have become obsessed with ColdFusion Builder Extensions. I am convinced that no other single feature of the IDE is as valuable as this. (And I love the rest of the features too, so I’m saying a lot here.) The ability to leverage ColdFusion know-how and features into tooling is awesome. A lot of the extensions we’ve shown off have been about code generation. I think that’s important, as it is big part of the Builder story. We make you more productive, but you make yourself even more productive. Of late though, I’ve been focused on extensions that do more than just generate code, they use ColdFusion capabilities in non-obvious ways. I’ll be posting them over the next few weeks.

Here’s the first:

I created a language translator that allows you to translate content in the editor window to other languages. As a first pass, it only does English, French, German, and Italian, but as I experiment I will expand them. To use:

• In the Editor window, highlight the content you want to translate
• Right-click it to bring up the context menu
• Choose Google Language Tools -> Translate

That should drop the translated content back into your editor, below the original content.

To build this I used a few different pieces. In the last Public Beta drop of ColdFusion we added the ability to grab highlighted content from the editor window in a ColdFusion Builder extension. I take that highlighted content and pass it to the server. On the server I pass it to a CFC that I wrote that consumes the Google Language API. It’s a JSON-powered webservice, so I used ColdFusion support for JSON to simply get at this data. From there, I can use a feature of ColdFusion Builder called “callbacks” to write the translated code back to the editor window. Specifically, I used the “inserttext” callback, which allows me to insert text at a specific line of code. I can use this to carefully place the translated text.

Possible use cases:

• Translating HTML content to multiple languages
• Translating code comments to your native language
• Creating language packs for your applications

Sound cool? Check it out on Riaforge: Google Language Tools Extension.