Get ColdFire!

As you may have seen on Ray's blog, today we released version 1.0 of the ColdFire ColdFusion Debugger. For those that don't know ColdFire is extension to the Firebug Firefox extension, similar to YSlow, only ColdFire displays ColdFusion debugging info. To use ColdFire you need to install a custom debugging template on your server (coldfire.cfm) then configure ColdFusion to use this template via the Administrator. (Detailed installation instructions can be found in the download.)

To actually see the output from this template you need to be using Firefox and have both the Firebug and ColdFire extensions installed. Once everything is set up you will then have your ColdFusion debugging info available in the Firebug panel instead of on the page.

ColdFire shows a great deal of info including:

General Info:

ColdFire shows some general info like Application name, ColdFusion version, Template, etc.

Execution Times:

Similar to the default debugging template, ColdFire shows the execution times of all the templates and CFC methods executed in the request. Exection times of more than than 50ms are shown in red.

DB Queries:

ColdFire also shows all the queries executed for a particular request. Unlike the the built in debugging templates you can choose to have ColdFire output queryparam values in the displayed query SQL by selecting the "Parse Query Parameters" option, which is very useful if you need to copy a query to a SQL editor to execute against your database.

Note that this option is enabled by by default, but you can turn it off if you would like to see what is actually being passed to the query using <cfqueryparam>.

Traces:

ColdFire outputs messages from the <cftrace> tag color coded depending on the type: information, warning, error, or fatal Information.

Timer:

ColdFire also outputs messages from the <cftimer> tag.

Variables:

Probably one of the cooler features of ColdFire is the ability to dump page variables. From the variables tab you can add a variable you would like to dump by typing its name on the Add Variable line and pressing enter. Refresh the page and you will then see the value of the variable in the value column of the Variables tab. You can add as many variables as you would like. To remove a variable, hover over the variable row and click the "X" button that appears at the right of the row. To remove all variables and start fresh click Clear Variables in the Options menu.

Note that right now you get a dump of the metadata for components and functions (UDFs). This means they show up as an object and do not have the special formatting/color you may be used to with the cfdump tag.

Speaking of formatting, the nice formatting of complex variables comes courtesy of the Javascript dump method. Thanks to the folks at Net Grow Web Design for letting us use their code in this project.

So please check ColdFire out and let us know what you think. I'll be posting more soon on how we implemented some of this nifty goodness...