Those of you using the CF RDS plugin released with Flex/CFMX 7.02 for your CF development be advised that the Eclipse 3.2.1 build may/will break the RDS Query Viewer.  I say 'may' because I haven't seen anybody else talking about this, so it could just be me.

The RDS Data View plugin works fine, and you can still see the table structures in the tree, etc., but if you click on the Query Viewer button you will get an error.  I tried this on two different workstations and suffered the consequences both times, so I backed out to the 3.2 build again, where things are working fine.

Curious to know if anybody else saw this behavior, or got it to work with 3.2.1?

I am working on a project with the U.S. Navy, on a secured, audited network.  I am having a wonderful time adjusting to the reality that I can no longer install anything I want on my development computer (which is an addiction that is going to require a lot of rehab on my part). There is an approved list of development software that one must adhere to, and if you install something that is not on that list, you  can get into quite a bit of trouble, from what I understand.

The development team I work with is using Dreamweaver 8, and there is nothing wrong with that, but I have been using Eclipse/CFEclipse for the better part of a year, and I would prefer to continue doing so, if possible.  So I asked the question of whether or not  Eclipse is on the approved list.  As with all things Government, this could take a while to find out the answer.

In the meantime, I noticed that JRE 1.5 was already installed on the computer.  So while at home, I copied a fresh install of Eclipse 3.2 to a 512MB USB memory stick and added CFEclipse and XMLBuddy.  They are not using SVN, so I left that out, along with the nice CF RDS extensions I have been using, and MyEclipse.  I popped the stick in the slot when I got to work, and Eclipse/CFEclipse launched just fine, albeit a little bit slower than normal.

The first time I launched it, Eclipse setup a default workspace on the local hard drive, so I deleted that and placed the workspace on the USB stick as well.  I have been using it for a couple weeks now, and it works great. It doesn't install any files to the local hard drive and the only mouse-dropping left behind is the .project file left in the project directory, which nobody has a problem with.

I am hoping that eventually I will be able to install to the local hard drive, so that I can use the other plugins, but for now, this works pretty well.

Dean Harmon, the Adobe engineer responsible for the CF ReportBuilder and FlexBuilder2 ColdFusion Application/Extension Wizards, has tweaked CFEclipse 1.3 to make it compatible with Eclipse 3.1.

This is a short-term godsend as far as I am concerned. Many of us updated our Eclipse builds to 3.2 to take advantage of some of the feature enhancements of CFEclipse 1.3, which would only run under 3.2. Because FlexBuilder2 was built using the Eclipse 3.1 platform, you were left with two options; either install and use the supported standalone version without CFEclipse 1.3, or install the FB2 plugin into the Eclipse 3.2 build and use it in an unsupported manner. Since FlexBuilder2 was just released a couple months ago, I opted for the former. This resulted in having to work in two different environments.

Dean's integration work now means you can access CFEclipse functionality while using the standalone FlexBuilder. This is a big deal if you are a ColdFusion developer trying to work with CFCs and remoting.

The updated CFEclipse build can be found here.