CFEclipse Project Status Update

[Andrew]

I'm posting here rather than cfeclipse-dev as I am assuming the list here is a superset of that list, and this is probably of interest to everyone.

There's been a few things happening in the CFEclipse space over the last couple of months and I wanted to take the opportunity to bring folks up to speed with it.

CFEclipse Google Groups

====================

After many years (10+?) managing this Google Group, Jim Priest handed over the admin side of the Group to myself a few months ago as he indicated he had moved on to other things.   I'd like to publicly thank Jim for all his efforts over the years and I hope we can continue to build on his legacy.

Future CFEclipse Development?

=========================

A couple of weeks ago Jeremy Hustman and myself had an email exchange on cfeclipse-dev and we've since been frequenting #cfeclipse on IRC.  

Jeremy and myself had some discussions and we decided to try and get things rolling again.  

Given neither of us really knew much about the existing code base, we thought maybe it best to start with a blank canvas, pulling in the bits we can from the existing code base and learn as we go.  I've been doing this a few hours a day for the past couple of weeks and I am working on just moving across the Syntax Highlighting at this stage.  I've made reasonable progress but I'm not quite in a position to show it off yet.

However, on slack this morning, I noticed a link to this post:

https://nukleos.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/cfeclipse-is-dead-or-is-it/

It looks like there's still some interesting in CFEclipse and Denny also chimed in saying he's been working on CFEclipse which is awesome awesome new.  As a result I think we need to try and coordinate stuff a bit as we now have at least 3 willing contributors so it looks like a good time to build a bit of momentum.

So I want to make a proposal - let's get all CFEclipse developers over to Slack.  I know Denny's a regular there.  I'm a semi-regular but I will make sure I'm there.  There's an IDE channel there and we can discuss a CFEclipse specific one if needs be.

Let's get it happening folks!

Andrew.

[denstar]

On 11/10/2015 04:02 PM, Andrew wrote:
...

> So I want to make a proposal - let's get all CFEclipse developers over
> to Slack. I know Denny's a regular there. I'm a semi-regular but I
> will make sure I'm there. There's an IDE channel there and we can
> discuss a CFEclipse specific one if needs be.
>
> Let's get it happening folks!

What he said!

Thanks for rolling up the sleeves and diving in Andrew!

You too Jeremy!

And hey, the build is in CI (and has been for, um, 1 year and 7 months,
says Jenkins), so that is cool. I'd kinda forgotten I did that... which
is simply *mad*, as it was actually kinda monumental. Ah well, that's
my thing apparently: Doing cool stuff and... FIGHT CLUB!

At least I like to think it's "first rule" related-- build scripts too
powerful to be run, lest they build the builder, or something sweet like
that... but it's probably more along the lines o-- SQUIRREL!

But I digress.

I'll get what's there cleaned up a bit, and see what happens when I
commit something. (Fires a build? Or rips a hole in the space-time
continuum? Only one way to know for sure!)

Isolating chunks of functionality is a good way to get a handle on
Eclipse, and we are dragging along stuff we don't need anymore (FTP, for
example). A rewrite has been needed for... O.M.G.! Ok, so, a little
longer than a little while. Also, this just in: WTF, time?!?

:Denny

[Peter Boughton]

Super Cool. :)

If there's CI and regression tests in place, I'd love to fix bugs and maybe refactor/simplify code - but it'd be on a very sporadic basis; I don't have the spare time to be actively involved.

I'll probably forget to check back later so please do give a poke/bump once things are all coordinated and flowing and stuff - even if I don't get around to dev stuff, I'm happy to be a guinea pig and help find annoying bugs in new releases.

[Andrew Myers]

Excellent!   Pleased to hear it!

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For more information on CFEclipse visit: cfeclipse.org
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[denstar]

Hi folks!

Just a heads up: I've merged develop into master, and updated the releng
script to build for Mars (Eclipse 4.5), as it was failing looking for
the old eclipse version.

The next CFEclipse version will be 1.5.0, and is mainly just the changes
from the develop branch (interface wizard being the main new feature,
with a couple parser tweaks thrown in for good measure) that have been
chill'n for the last year+.

I needed to do that to get it building on CI again-- I still need to
tweak the script to push the update site over to the main site, and get
the tweets going again, so don't expect to be able to update from within
eclipse yet, but it's getting there.

I'm personally leaning towards a rewrite using xtext, which I think we
could call CFEclipse 2.0, but we'll have to do some more experimentation
before biting the bullet.

I'm thinking that before I push out 1.5.0 to stable, I should add the
latest dictionaries for Lucee and CF11. It'll be cool to get stable
installing on Mars without error, but I'd like to make it a bit more
noteworthy than just that, and the dictionaries will be useful for
version 2.0, regardless of which route we take for implementation.
FWIW, We are also looking at leveraging/modifying cfdocs for the
"dictionary", or at the least, augmenting it. (Which reminds me, I need
to verify the F1 help points there.)

:Denny

[Andrew Myers]

Great work Denny!

[AJ Mercer]

Spent too long on social media - was looking for star/heart/like button on Denny's email

--
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For more information on CFEclipse visit: cfeclipse.org
For support, FAQ and tips and tricks visit: https://github.com/cfeclipse/cfeclipse/wiki

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AJ Mercer
<webonix:net strength="Industrial" /> | <webonix:org community="Open" />
http://twitter.com/webonix

[mike...@gmail.com]

Hi Denny,

Your comments are great to hear!

Back in the day, I dug pretty deep into the Antlr parser for CF. Recently I've actually done some playing with XText as a ColdFusion parser and have it down to one major hurdle that I suspect is a simple understanding issue with the way XText works, but I like the idea of using it a ton. One of the reasons I'm interested in it is to potentially push the IntelliJ IDEA plugin further among others. Basically, I feel it would be very worth it to create a solid CF parser using XText such that any development project could use it as well as CFEclipse. Creating this type of thing more than once will likely just mean a lot of implementations that complete a different 80% of the potential needs, so I'd love to help out if needed. I don't get a lot of time, as evidenced by the fact that I was once a committer with Mark Drew, but so erratic that I didn't get to do much more than offer some help here and there. With that particular feature though, I should be able to spend more time.

The one hurdle I refer to is the fact that cf is a templating language in which generic output is the default token, while the elements of the language are marked up uniquely to separate the language from the output. I can get Xtext to match most of these things beautifully, but I am a bit stuck when it comes to making it work with output mixed in amongst the tags, making it effectively useless as it is haha.

Anyway, thanks again for pushing the project forward and I hope I have the opportunity to help out somewhere,

Mike

[Andrew Myers]

Hi Mike,

I've been fiddling with Xtext a bit but I think I've run into similar
issues to you.

Here's what I've got to date: https://github.com/am2605/cfml-xtext

It'd be cool to see what you did in case it bumps us in the right direction.

Anyone else looking at Xtext? It'd be great to compare notes.

Andrew.

[mike...@gmail.com]

Hey Andrew,

Looks like we have the exact same problem. You implemented a lot more than I did of the actual language. I ran into this really quick in trying to think about the problems and never could get around it, so I reduced my grammer to one cf tag that optionally had a body.

I'm going to see if I can find a good resource to get us some help on this. Even if cfeclipse doesn't use this, I think it would be incredibly useful for other stuff. If you are up for it, I'd be happy to work together on this. Maybe Denny has some thoughts as well if he has already given it a go too.

Meanwhile, I'll kick off a new thread on Coldfusion Xtext Grammar.

Mike