Thought Delimited

So overnight an update to ColdFusion Builder was released. According to the update instructions, if you're running ColdFusion Builder as a plug-in to Eclipse (like I am), you need to start/restart Eclipse clean, which can be done by typing "eclipse -clean" at the command prompt within your Eclipse folder.

The problem I ran into was I couldn't do that on my MacBook Pro. I opend up a Terminal window, navigated to my Eclipse folder, tried the command, and was told "command not found." 

I had an eclipse exec file in the directory along with the normal Eclipse.app application bundle file, so I'm not sure why it didn't work. I probably either did something wrong or perhaps there's something funky about my Eclipse install.

But fortunately I found another way to launch Eclipse with the clean option in an old set of Eclipse (3.3) documentation.  Here's what I did (after installing the ColdFusion Builder update):

• I opened a Finder window and navigated to my Eclipse directory.
• I right-clicked on the Eclipse.app application bundle icon, and selected "Show Package Contents" from the context menu.
• In the new Finder window that popped up, I went into Contents/MacOS, right-clicked on the eclipse.ini file, and chose to open it in TextEdit.
• I added "-clean" to the top of the eclipse.ini file, saved the file, then closed it.
• I then restarted Eclipse.
• Once Eclipse was up and running, I re-opened the eclipse.ini file, removed the "-clean" line, and saved it again.

Earlier today, Dan Vega tweeted:

"this is pretty freaking cool, works in ColdFusion Builder! http://wireframesketcher.com/blog"

So I went and checked it out. WireframeSketcher is an Eclipse plug-in that lets you create wireframe page mockups, similar to Balsamiq Mockups.  I download the trial version and took it for a brief spin. You simply create a new blank Screen file and start dragging and dropping page elements from the Palette view (labels, text boxes, tabbed panes, etc.) onto the Screen, resizing and re-positioning as you go. When you're finished, you can export the file as a PNG or a PDF file.

The WireframeSketcher website mentioned that the layout information for each screen was stored as XML data, so the thought crossed my mind that maybe you could feed the XML to a parsing script that could use that data to output actual HTML/CSS. Unfortunately (as I kind of suspected), the positioning of the wireframe elements is achieved with hard-coded x and y pixel coordinates, and it would be hard to translate that into the kind of relative or "in the flow" positioning used on most web pages.

Still, if you want to add a wireframing tool to your toolset and you already use Eclipse or an Eclipse-based IDE (by the way, these guys specifically name Flash Builder and ColdFusion Builder as compatible IDEs, so props to them for being aware of the Adobe tools), this is probably worth checking out. You can try it out for free for at least a week before you get prompted to pay for a license.