Working with large numbers of projects in Eclipse and any of the Eclipse based products such as Flex Builder, ColdFusion Builder or CFEclipse can become cumbersome and become a bottle neck in a good workflow.

One of the many ways to work better within this space is to make efficient use of your navigator (or project explorer) and searching dialogs. Working sets can be used to filter search results as well as your navigator view, but constantly switching them can be a pain. Window working sets however can be a globally applied and just a few tweaks can make using them easy. Here is what I recommend!

1. Make sure you have the menu item turned on. Customize your current perspective (Window ==» Customize Perspective). Under command group availability, make sure "window working set" and "Working set manipulation" are checked.
2. Create a shortcut: Go to Window ==» Preferences ==» General ==» Keys. I prefer to use F3, since it's a continent key and I don't use its default binds ever. Sometimes the scopes can be difficult to always get right, so I choose "all editor scopes", "In Console View" and "In Windows" for the best results.
3. Make your views take advantage of "Window Working sets". The two most common usage points will be your Navigator and Search Results. In the option menus for both of these you can choose working sets from the list; however instead of separately choosing your projects per view, choose "Windows Working Set" radio button.
4. Now you can hit {F3} or what ever your chosen hot key was at any time. You can change, edit or create new working sets from one interface and all your views will obey this choice. This is fantastic if you work on multiple large projects in a single days time especially.

I've worked on a number of projects lately that have required the reviewing of HTML mail generated by ColdFusion's CFMail. In every development environment I've worked in the mail server is either 0.0.0.0 or there is a dummy mail gateway. In in either case knowing what the HTML will really look like can be difficult.

To help me with this issue I whipped up this very simple Adobe AIR app to help me look at the results. It's not a perfect solution and cannot account for the multitude of environments that the email will be viewed from, but it will render plain text and HTML emails close to what they would be viewed as in a mail client; it's also nice that to app is dead simple/basic.

Just point the app at your ColdFusion instance's "bad mail" folder and make sure your email server is set to 0.0.0.0 in CF Administrator

CFMail Viewer : Trunk - http://svn.empiregpservices.com/svn/OpenSource/CFMailViewer/trunk
CFMail Viewer : Branch 0.5.0 - http://svn.empiregpservices.com/svn/OpenSource/CFMailViewer/branches/0.5.0/

SVN Username = public
SVN Password = public

I ran into this little gem this morning and I was stummped. FireBug wasn't even showing an attempt to call any images, ruling out server side issues since the image calls were plainly in the source code.

Turns out some how my local host got added to an exception list for loading images; I didn't even know FireFox had this feature.

1. Tools » Options
2. Content Tab
3. Make sure Load Images is Cheked
4. Click the respective Exceptions button
5. Remove sites that shouldn't be in there

I had about 8 sites located in this exception list, all but one made no sense why they were there. I can only assume that there is some hot key or trigger that causes a site to get tossed into this bucket.

I needed to adjust an accordion to make it look more natural and less snappy. I found lots of "how to use" easing pages with examples obviously but the differences between many of the easing functions like Exponential, Exponential, Linear, Quadratic, Quartic, Quintic and Sine are so small that watching them one at a time yields nothing helpful.

This little app should be helpful in comparing the different options you have. Tweaking options are limited, but enough to give you a good idea of what one to use. I excluded Elastic and Bounce from this example since they were very different from all the others and play a very obvious role/function.

I am building a new site on my server that will be another Mango Blog. Mango is not setup for running multiple instances like it would be nice if it did, but very easily you can at least use the same file base. While this won't save you much on anything other than disk space for the CF Files and for the file cache if your CF server has that turned on; it certainly is nice to have one install location instead of 2 or 3.

To do this you will need to edit only 2 files:

1. Application.cfm

   • Change the "this.name" setter on line 7ish to something that would be URL driven. In my case I used:
     this.appKey = replaceNoCase(cgi.server_name, "www.", "");
     this.name = "mango_#right(hash(this.appKey),50)#_v1_4";
   • The around line 41 you will find a reference to config.cfm. I've replaced this with: config_#this.appKey#.cfm
     

2. admin/setup/Setup.cfm

   • Using the same method as Application.cfm I created an appKey var in the function saveConfig. Around line 268/269 will be two references to config.cfm; again replace these with: config_#this.appKey#.cfm

Now Mango Blog will be using config files based on the server name of the current site. The only secondary change I made was in the config files themselves.

• Make sure the tablePrefix values are different
• I adjusted my asset directories to be unique per site: assets/content/{new site name}/