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One of our main reasons for switching to eclipse (and its CF plugin CFECLIPSE) was the excellent CVS (concurrent versioning system) integration.

It smooths out the kinks in CVS to make it an intuative tool to use.

For example if you move a file from one folder to another CVS wants you to delete and add very specifically, but eclipse just handles this for you in the background making it seem like a single commit operation.

All this power is available from the Navigation view (shows your projects and the files in them, in a tree structure) on the right click 'Team' menu. From here you can commit or update as appropriate.

One of the other Team options is the 'Synchronize' view

I tended to avoid this at first preferring to update and commit myself, however I'm now using this as my default view of the project from a CVS point of view. It gathers up incoming and outgoing changes that are pending and also highlights any conflicts (where you have edited a file and meanwhile another developer has commited a later version) and allows you to resolve those conflicts by displaying a diff of the two versions.

You can right click and update, commit, and resolve conflicts directly from this menu on individual files or on groups of files selected.

If you use CVS and CFECLIPSE give it a try.

A few people have blogged this, but its not obvious how to get just the RDS plugin from all the flex labs download connectivity pages :-)

http://labs.macromedia.com/wiki/index.php/ColdFusion/Flex_Connectivity:Eclipse_RDS_Support for example is very misleading. I think it is really aimed at people who do not have the cfeclipse plugin already, but it sounds as though by getting the stable CFE plugin release you will get the RDS release as well which is not the case, since the RDS plugin is not part of the CFE plugin project, it is a separate plugin and produced by Adobe.

Here's how you get to it on the Adobe labs pages.

1. http://labs.macromedia.com/wiki/index.php/ColdFusion/Flex_Connectivity then click the Downloads link (no.2 in the table of contents)
2. Click Download ColdFusion Extensions for Flex Builder 2.0 > this may take you to a login screen where you need to be registered. The direct link is http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs
3. Click the Flex Builder 2.0 link
4. Finally click the Download ColdFusion Extensions to Flex Builder 2.0 link

See the screen shot below! You arrived!

Mark Drew did an excellent presentation of the up and coming new features for the next release of cfeclipse, at the UKCFUG last night (London,UK).

Mark introduced himself and explained how the development of the cfeclipse plugin has progressed over the years and some of the people in the cf community that have contributed. Mark has now become the lead developer by virtue of doing most work recently on the project.

For those unfamiliar with eclipse and the cfeclipse plugin Mark started with some background. He stressed the importance of understanding the difference between what the base eclipse IDE platform supplies and what additional plugins (like cfeclipse) provide. (Partly so that you moan to the right development team on the right mailing list if things break or you want new features :)

Mark demonstrated the ease of installing eclipse (the base IDE) and then how to add any plugin can be done either by downloading the plugin (a jar file or full folder) and dropping this into the eclipse plugin folder, or by entering an update URL within eclipse which will then download the plugin for you to the correct location.

Mark demonstrated some new and some existing features of eclipse and cfeclipse, I will just cover the new features here because there existing key features are covered admirably by Nathan Strutz

New Features (availble in next release)

• Component Explorer
• More Dictionaries
• Dictionary View
• Jump-to or create cfincluded files
• Toolbar Homesite+/CFStudio style
• Drag'n'drop support for files
• RDS plugin from adobe

Read more...