Thought Delimited

Over the past few days, one particular CFC in my current project has grown rather large (a few hundred lines of code), and as it grew larger it became harder and harder to edit it in ColdFusion Builder (the second beta): the editor would struggle to keep up with my typing, pausing for a few seconds before displaying the changes I'd made.ﾠ

Not being in the mood to try and break up that CFC into several smaller ones quite yet, I did some experimenting and came up with two short-term solutions to the problem:

• The chief cause of the performance lag seems to be the syntax checking. You can turn off the syntax checking in the editor by going into Preferences, navigating to ColdFusion -> Editor Profiles -> Editor -> Syntax Checking and unchecking the "Enable Syntax Checking" box. The setting change takes place immediately (no need to restart Builder). The drawback of course is that the editor will no longer point out syntax errors until you change the setting back.

• I discovered that collapsing the code blocks I wasn't currently working with also dramatically improved performance (I'm guessing that the syntax checker ignores the code in collapsed code blocks, which makes sense). You can selectively collapse code blocks manually by clicking on the minus signs in the line-numbering column to the left of your code, or you can right-click on the line-numbering column and select Folding -> Collapse All from the context menu to collapse all of the code and then just expand the parts of the file you're working on.

  The drawback to this solution is that the collapsing/folding isn't preserved when you save the file:ﾠ if you close the file and open it again, all of the code will be visible. I couldn't find any option for preserving the current viewing state of the file.

As a whole, I like the new ColdFusion Builder IDE. I've run into a few quirks and roadblocks while trying to install it and set it up the way I want it on my machines, but I suspect that's more a result of how my machines are set up than a failing of the product, and hopefully I'll get it all straight soon.

But CF Builder is missing one feature that I need to make it my sole, do-it-all IDE: support for the WebDAV file transfer protocol. At the university where I work, WebDAV is THE protocol used to allow developers to upload, download, update, and delete files on the web server because it makes it easy for the web hosting unit to delegate a certain amount of control to departmental representatives in what is essentially a shared webhosting environment.

This isn't exactly a new problem for me: CFEclipse didn't provide any WebDAV support of its own either. While there is an Eclipse plugin in existence that provides both FTP and WebDAV support, it's old, doesn't support the secure WebDAV implementation that we use, and is no longer being worked on/developed further. So while I've been doing my coding and testing locally using CFEclipse, I've had to rely on Dreamweaver or a stand-alone WebDAV desktop client to actually upload my files to the server. It's not the worst process in the world, but it would be nice to be able to handle it all in one program/IDE.

At CFUnited, I asked Adam Lehman (Product Manager for ColdFusion at Adobe) if there were any plans in the works for adding WebDAV support to Builder (seeing as how Dreamweaver supports WebDAV). He indicated that he didn't think so, but suggested that I submit a feature enhancement through the CF Builder bug database.

So I did: it's request #79437.

If you have any interest in seeing WebDAV support added to ColdFusion Builder (whether because you also have a need to upload files via WebDAV, or because you simply feel Builder should be capable of handling any file management protocol), please visit the CF Builder bug database, log in with your Adobe ID and password (if you don't already have an Adobe account, it's easy to sign up for one), go to the request record, and use the "Bug Votes" option to vote for the request and/or the "Comments" option to weigh in on the topic.