i read about the Google Closure Compiler and i will try to use it to make my web application better. But i think it is doing the same things like the dojo shrinksafe.
Has anyone tried to use the Google Closure Compiler for a complex dojo project?
Thanks
Benjamin
Yes, Google Closure Compiler works fine with Dojo projects. Because Closure is derived from Dojo, it has similar concepts (modules, loaders, the build, and so on) so it is potentially possible to use some advanced features of Closure Compiler with Dojo, which go beyond simple minification.
We (Dojo) will evaluate what we can reuse and leverage from Closure and how we can improve interoperability. Obviously it will include all tooling too.
Closure will probably work with any valid javascript code. I fed it an extremely packed, obfuscated version of a complex Prototype project of mine and it spit out a perfectly working version. So even if your code has already been shrinked by Dojo, you can probably use Closure on top of it. You should, however, choose one of the two.
As of Dojo 1.4 (not yet released, but the code is in the subversion trunk of Dojo), you can now use Closure Compiler as an option for the Dojo build process. It takes a bit of setting up. Instructions on how to use Closure Compiler with the Dojo build system.
Dojo 1.6 is compatible (after some minor modifications) with Closure Compiler in Advanced mode.
http://dojo-toolkit.33424.n3.nabble.com/file/n2636749/Using_the_Dojo_Toolkit_with_the_Closure_Compiler.pdf?by-user=t
Stephen
I happen to have a 12,000 (26,000 if you include dojox/dijit imports) line dojo 1.3.2 application I am about to release.
Well I used the standard dojo build system to throw it all into one lovely big one megabyte file. Then I introduced it to the google closure compiler, the compilation went very well reducing the package down to 350 kb, 100kb less than yahoo ui, and 150kb less than shrinkwrap. I, of course, did it all in advanced mode like a man.
So far so good, then it was time to load it up! The results were mixed. The site did seem to work, but I did get quite a few pesky errors telling me that various things behind the dojo prefix could not be found. I wasn't able to work out exactly what was going on as I didn't have closure addon for firebug ready, but I didn't notice issues the actual operation of the site - though I posit if I looked hard enough I would have found them.
So I thought to myself it appears the closure compiler is renaming dojo name space in my compiled.js to make them inconsistent with dojo.js. It seemed like an ideal solution was to combine dojo.js.uncompressed.js with my blob.js.uncompressed.js using the closure compiler. This resulted in a 51kb reduction in the size of the dojo library so far so good! Bad idea dojo didn't much like this at all and refused to load! It just downloaded then just sat there in protest of google's world domination.
I have done some further research into this matter, from what I read dojo 1.4.0 does support closure in 'simple' mode, but this is rather pointless because as I read closure simple mode provides a similar amount of compression to yui.
Anyway, those are my thoughts, I have looked at closure a little, it looks like a very nice library. The css layout looks drastically simpler than dijit's, this is something I am very fond of, I've often found it easier to rewrite dijits than try and theme them correctly. It seems to be missing some elements of the dojo library I am rather fond of such as dijit._Widget, dijit. _container/contained and of course the famous dojo.declare(). I suppose I could rebuild these, but why should I?
Addition:
Oh it also appears to be lacking a good RPC, cometed framework, and publish/subscriber framework. Unless I am mistaken. Don't get me wrong I want to like closure, I'm not a dojo apologist by any stretch of the imagination, I just like these parts of dojo. The addition of require and provide does make this a serious contender from my perspective. The lack of a meaningful system of this nature drove me away from jquery.
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 11 years ago.
I am just starting at a job in which I will be using a lot of ColdFusion. What is the best IDE/Editor to use?
I'd like to provide my personal reasoning behind why you might choose any of these editors (at least the ones I'm familiar with). Just saying "use this, use that" is not at all helpful. To large degree, the question is wrong. There's rarely a "best IDE" for a language; rather, there are multiple environments, each suiting particular needs. Here goes:
1) Dreamweaver
Why you would use it: its history as a designer tool makes it much easier for "non-coder" types to start cranking out websites. If you're a solo developer building a lot of "Tom's Corner Store" type of sites, even if they require some CF Coding (mailing list, subscribers, current specials, light content management, etc), its design tools, "template" features, and ease-of-deployment (ftp) make it an attractive choice. It has good-enough code coloring and code completion for the built-in CF tags and functions. It can interrogate user-defined functions in the same page. It has excellent CSS support. You can find a wealth of extensions, too. It's pretty stable and, in my experience, hasn't been very "crashy". It will do a fair amount of code generation for you as well (whether that code is "good" is debatable). All in all Dreamweaver is incredible software for web site designers.
Why you wouldn't use it: It is not free, and it is certainly not a "coder's editor". While it provides for extensions, they're typically interface-focused (javascript validation, etc), unlike say Eclipse plugins, which can run the gamut. For large projects, it simply does not have the code navigation features that many coders come to expect. It's web-focused. So if you're a polyglot, or even just like to dabble in compiled languages (java, etc), then you'll need to keep another editor on hand for those tasks.... you won't be able to do it all in one place. ColdFusion unit testing support is nonexistent in Dreamweaver. There is no step debugging for ColdFusion.
2) CFEclipse plugged into Eclipse.
Why you'd use it: CFEclipse is going on 6 years old now and has matured significantly. It's been quite stable for the last few years and most crashiness has been due to Eclipse itself and not CFEclipse (which was not true in the early days). Recently CFEclipse has seen an infusion of fresh blood and features are being added to make coding in it even more productive. It contains a wealth of keyboard shortcuts, many of the toolbar features people love from ColdFusion Studio days, and Eclipse's in-built code navigation features (namely, Ctrl-Shift-R for finding files quickly).
It has content assist for native CF Tags and functions, and some support for in-page variables, though that's never worked all that well. It does not support in-page functions, nor does it provide native true component insight (i.e. insight into components that you write and use in other code). It will support component insight to some extent with Dictionaries, but even then, it requires a lot of work on the part of the dictionary creator. Most people find dictionaries too much work to maintain, in my experience.
The lastest version of CFEclipse contains the best CFML formatting you'll find.
For me, "method explorer" and "Snip Tree View" -- particularly keyboard shortcuts for inserting snippets -- have been big productivity boosters.
If you work with ColdSpring, ModelGlue, Mach-II, ColdBox, and other frameworks with xml configuration files, CFEclipse's Framework Explorer is brilliant.
Because it's a plugin to Eclipse, you can do everything else you'd want to do in Eclipse. You wanna code java? You can. You want webservice support? you got that. You want to do step debugging, you can do so with the free Adobe-provided extensions for Eclipse.
The large plugin ecosystem is one of the most attractive features of Eclipse, and you shouldn't discount this when deciding on an editor. For example, I would not want to work without Mylyn, which integrates with issue tracking and in my experience has transformed the way I work, much for the better.
Eclipse's version control system support is excellent as well. Subversion is well supported; there's a VSS plugin; and recently a git plugin (if not two) has been accepted into the Eclipse foundation so we'll see native git support very soon (you can get it now with a plugin).
Eclipse's ANT support is excellent.
You can easily plug the MXUnit Eclipse plugin into Eclipse for unit testing your CFML (full disclosure: I contribute to MXUnit).
Finally, I have full confidence that the folks working on CFEclipse -- Denny, Mark, Jim, Peter, et al. -- will continue to work toward keeping CFEclipse as the best open source CFML IDE available. These are some of the brightest minds in the ColdFusion community and are passionate about their mission. If you choose to use CFEclipse, you are not choosing to use an IDE that will be supplanted by ColdFusion Builder. This project is in good hands.
Why you wouldn't use it: it's a code IDE, not a design tool like Dreamweaver. It's not perfect... code assist can be too aggressive in its suggestions. Eclipse itself, especially when you pile it up with all kinds of plugins, can get unstable on lesser machines. Finally, people who don't like the "Project" view of the world often have complaints about it because they're used to working directly with the file system view of the world. Its deployment support is nowhere near as simple as Dreamweaver, though you can find plugins that get close.
3) ColdFusion Builder
Why you'd use it: all of what I said previously about Eclipse itself applies to CFBuilder when used as a plugin to Eclipse. I cannot speak to the Standalone version because as of this writing, it still doesn't support plugins very well. This will most surely be fixed by the time it is released, but I don't want to speculate on what the Standalone may or may not do.
One of CFBuilder's big draws is "Extensions". These are a way to plug in CFML code into your editor. It's hard to describe, so I'd suggest googling for "ColdFusion Builder Extensions", and you'll most likely be amazed. Adobe's Terry Ryan has created "Apptacular" for scaffolding applications from a database, and Brian Rinaldi has a series of posts on building CFBuilder extensions. These are huge and will prove themselves to be a developer's best friend after CFBuilder is released.
CFBuilder's deployment support is, in my opinion, on par with if not superior to Dreamweaver's.
CFBuilder does not require an additional plugin to do step debugging. Just hit the debug button and off you go.
CFBuilder contains true component insight, meaning that it can introspect components you write and provide ctrl-space content assist. It can be wonky, however, and does require some configuration. But please remember that as of now, CFBuilder is still in beta. My best guess is that it'll be at least a few versions until all the kinks are worked out of this feature. Still, it's a big productivity and learning booster to get content assist on your own components.
CFBuilder provides a "Servers" view for stopping/starting your CF Server. It's built on Aptana and so contains the Aptana "tail log" view, which is great for watching log files. Just like CFEclipse, it has a Snip Tree View.
The CFBuilder "vision" is led by Adobe's Adam Lehman. He's passionate about CF and is a force of nature. I have great hopes for CFBuilder because of Adam's leadership.
Why you wouldn't use it:
For one, it won't be free. Noone outside Adobe knows yet how much it will cost, however. "Extensions" and the deployment features alone may be worth the price. Time will tell.
Because it's an Adobe product, I think it's reasonable to assume that releases will come as frequently as most Adobe products, which means... not very often. While CFEclipse deploys rather frequently lately -- and makes available a "nightly" site for the brave -- CFBuilder will most likely not do such daring-do. CFEclipse can afford to make potentially unstable builds available to the public, while it is perhaps not in Adobe's best interests to do so with CFBuilder.
Finally, it's still in Beta and might not be released for some time. If you get it now and start using it, remember that. In my experience, debugging is wonky, content assist sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, and a lot of people have experience crashiness. It's free beta software... you're getting what you pay for. But know that the more you work with this beta release, and particularly if you provide feedback via the public bug database, the better off all of us will be if it provides a best of breed editor for CFML.
Personally:
At home, when I do "designer" work, I use Dreamweaver when I feel that its Templates will help me build a site as quickly as possible. For existing side projects which require maintenance coding and easy deployments, I use ColdFusion builder.
At work, where I do almost no design work, CFEclipse has been my IDE since 2006. I've begun using ColdFusion builder a lot, though currently I split my time between CFBuilder and CFEclipse. One reason is that as of this writing, CFEclipse is more stable (i.e. it doesn't crash and I don't lose work). I fully expect stability problems to be mitigated by the time CFBuilder costs money.
Both CFBuilder and CFEclipse have public bug databases. CFEclipse has a well-attended public mailing list, and if you have questions, you'll get answers quickly. I cannot yet speak to the speed with which CFBuilder questions are answered.
Finally, for "coders", it's my experience that once you invest the time in learning the tools and shortcuts, Eclipse provides superior productivity compared with designer tools like Dreamweaver. For cranking out a designed site, a designer tool like Dreamweaver confers significant advantages.
The answer to the best ColdFusion IDE isn't an answer, but a question: "What are you trying to do with ColdFusion?" The answer to that question will lead you to an IDE that suits your needs for a particular project. Different circumstances or projects may lead you to a different tool which better suits your needs.
Notepad++ with CF syntax highlighting.
For free: Eclipse with CFEclipes plugin
For cost: If you're a developer, use Coldfusion Builder, if you're a front end designer Dreamweaver edits Coldfusion pretty well. I use it quite often.
I have heavily used Dreamweaver, CFeclipse with eclipse and now Coldfusion Builder. What I found is this:
1) Dreamweaver is only good for the few times you have to do some wysiwyg wizardry. The newer versions do have SVN integration so you might be able to get away with using it. I did use it for a few years on windows.
2) CFEclipse + Eclipse - Generally the standard of what' sbeen used for a while. Runs well, once you add in the Adobe dictionary files and subclipse, you have a good environment
3) Coldfusion Builder - This is Adobe's version of CFeclipse. It's still pretty new and getting to later beta. I switched to it about 6 months ago and haven't looked back. It's got a lot of wizards, including the ability to write your own plugins in CFML that will run right inside CFbuilder. It's free right now on beta but will likely be pretty cheap like the first flex builder that came out.
My Choice: Coldfusion Builder. It doesn't mean the others aren't capable, but you'll spend the least amoutn of time getting setup and maintaining your plugins, etc.
Since I had paid for and used Dreamweaver for a lot of years (Eclipse was generally sluggish sometimes on PCs' a while back until the excess of ram + cpu today), spending to have an adobe maintained copy of eclipse is okay with me. The wizards available in CFbuilder, especially for flex are excellent.
Hope that helps, good luck and share what you ended up picking and why!
For anyone who might stumble here from Google, you should also take a look at Sublime Text coupled with the ColdFusion package.
If you are familiar with Eclipse I would recommend Eclipse with coldfusion plugin.
http://www.cfeclipse.org/
Some use Eclipse, some use ColdFusion Builder, some use emacs or TextMate or vim. I use vim.
It doesn't take much time to try out an IDE or editor. Give them all a shot and stick with the one you like most.
The best IDE is ColdFusion Builder. It allows RDS, In Line Debugging, Extensions (written in ColdFusion!), Code Generation, Refactoring, supports JavaScript, CSS and HTML and so much more. It is currently in beta and should be released in production sometime this year.
CFEclipse is a great IDE for CFML and is the right choice if you are writing CFML for the open source engines. It is free and like most open-source free products it can do almost anything Builder can do if you invest the time to install the additional plugins (like Aptana) and tweak your setup just right.
I use both. At work, we use Builder. At home, I use CFEclipse.
Welcome to the CFML community!
Notepad++. Light and easy to use.
I'll vote for jEdit. While it doesn't offer great ColdFusion support beyond syntax highlighting, and therefore probably isn't great for learning ColdFusion, its flexibility in working with other languages (which seems to happen fairly often while working on the web), powerful macros, plug-in support, proper text wrapping, and loads of other features, make it the editor to which I always end up returning after trying out the "next best thing".
CFEclipse appears to be the most popular. Adobe has a beta of ColdFusion Builder (also based on Eclipse) but when I tried it a few months ago it was still buggy.
Personally I use TextMate (OS X) a pretty bare bones text editor.
I have used textpad, for 6 years, still a solid app, provides syntax coloring/highlighting, regular expressions support. Can easily search inside any file, through tons of folders/subfolders.
Just a fast loading, easy to use, tool.
Also has macros, and macro programming...
http://www.texptad.com
I'd like to throw E TextEditor for the Windows users in here as well. Its similar to sublime but it does have its advantages. E is more or less Textmate for windows and will allow you to run the cftextmate bundles. In addition to being lightweight and extremely fast you get the huge Textmate community developing bundles, color schemes, and other community driven content.
Some of the highlights of E is that it will allow you to open a directory and treat it directory as a project. Hitting Shift-Ctrl T will allow you to browse all the files in your project in a flattened hierarchy which allows you to find files extremely fast.
I use Intellij Idea 7 for Java dev. My dev is 'limited' to all J2SE features plus light JSP, Servlets, and super light usage of JPA. No J2EE, no massive use of random frameworks, etc.
Is it worth upgrading to ver 8? "Worth it" to me means better "core functionality" in terms of speed (ESPECIALLY startup speed), memory utilization (seems like it starts having serious problems with four or more projects open), and auto bug-finding.
More frameworks supported and more languages supported (other than perhaps Haskell and C++), and more refactorings don't interest me at this time.
A while back, I installed a preview version of 8 and it seemed -exactly- the same as 7, as far as my needs were concerned.
Anyone loving the upgrade to 8, and if so, why?
Thanks
It also seems to be easier to configure a new project over top of a complex collection of existing code.
For example, something that you would naturally configure into 5 or more modules.
There is a really beautiful go to/create test wizard that is bound to ctrl-shift-T. Worth the upgrade by itself
The best way to tell is to check out the list of new features and decide for yourself. I haven't discovered any single feature so far that by itself is worth upgrading - the simplified UML view is quite nice, as is the improved Maven integration. The UI feels a bit more streamlined and faster. It seems like most of the attention has gone into non-Java features like better Flex support (which I am really thankful for as I don't like FlexBuilder but I haven't had a chance to use yet).
IntelliJ 8 has a configure plugins feature that allows you to disable plugins with dependencies. Nothing trial and error couldn't replicate, but it is nice.
Startup is only marginally slower. But indexing once opened is a lot faster than before, even unnoticeable for most projects, except after a commit to Subversion. It seems a commit to subversion triggers the indexing twice.
I am working on the Diana-EAP build - but 8 has git integration built in. The EAP has better git integration than the 8.0.1 release - it looks like that is something they are really focusing on.
Definitely not! Seems that the variables defined in our custom taglibs are no longer able to be used in the jsp (worked in 7.0.4). All red. No auto complete.
Oh, and the new settings menu is horrendous!
Some benefits of IntelliJ IDEA 8:
IDEA 8 supports Subversion 1.5 new functionality - e.g. merge tracking, which may be useful especially if your team (like ours) uses a lot of development branches and thus merging is frequent.
One detail I appreciated about IDEA 8: As you probably know, IDEA has had changelists for pretty long now, built on top of any underlying version control system - this is a really useful feature. So, now that Subversion itself supports changeslists, IDEA's changelist implementation has been changed so that it is perfectly compatible with Subversion's native changeslists. (For example, you'll be able to work with any changelists created in IDEA also when using svn command line tools directly.)
Edit: in your case, perhaps it is not worthwhile to upgrade. For me, at least, startup and file indexing seems to be somewhat slower in 8 than 7. [But for me personally the upgrade was definitely worth it, because it solved a long-standing VCS problem with IDEA 7 - it could hang "waiting for VCS sync to finish" for an hour or whatever after hitting Ctrl-K.]