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.
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.
tpryan.blog 
Dangy! That is badass! I wrote my first extension last night and this is very inspiring.
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Terry, sorry if I missed this in the video, but in the response, are you sending back a refreshfile command?
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@Ben Thanks for the feedback. Glad I could impress.
As for the callback. No. There is no way to access the IDE-to-ColdFusion session from the IM handler. It is by definition asynchronous. So I have to resort to rewriting the file on desk, and trusting the IDE to detect the file change without the callback.
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Ah, gotcha, thanks. I am gonna take a look at your Translator project right now re: responses.
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