If you use, or would like to use, Firebug or ColdFire please consider voting for my CFUnited topic: Debugging ColdFusion Web Applications With Firebug and ColdFire. Using practical debugging examples, the presentation covers many of the core features Firebug and ColdFire. I also try hit some of the lesser know features for those more experienced with these Firefox add-ons.
I've posted a new ColdFire beta to RIAForge which works with recently released Firefox 3.6 and Firebug 1.5. I'm labeling this a beta because I discovered a ColdFusion 9 compatibility issue in my testing for this release. It appears ColdFusion's built in AJAX libraries have been updated slightly so the "Enable CFAJAX Debugging" feature does not currently work with CF 9. I'll work on updating this feature in the next couple of weeks. (Unfortunately the AJAX libraries shipped with CF are minimized and obfuscated so working with them is not as easy as it could be.) Because of the beta status of this release I've included both the ColdFire 1.4 and ColdFire 1.5 releases in the current RIAForge download. As always, if you have any issues please report them on the RIAForge project site.
Given all the security issues around ColdFusion in the past few months I thought it would be good idea to remind ColdFire users about a potential security issue. One of the enhanced features of ColdFire is the ability to dump variables without changing your code. For example, to see the application scope you can just type "application" in the variables tab, reload the page, and there you have your application scope dumped to the ColdFusion Firebug tab. This is a great feature during development but could also be an attack vector if used on a public server. Imagine you were running ColdFire on a public server and storing something like database credentials in the application scope. Depending on the debugging IP addresses configured in the ColdFusion administrator, someone running the ColdFire Firebug extension could come along and dump the application scope and see those credentials. Anyway, this isn't really an issue with ColdFire, it works as intended, just something to be aware of if you use the tool.
Today I was pretty stoked to find out that ColdFire was nominated for a Community Achievement Award in the Best Open Source Project category. I'm not sure who nominated ColdFire, but thank you. It is a honor just to be mentioned with other projects such as ColdBox, BlogCFC, Mango Blog, Mura CMS, ColdSpring, Transer and Model Glue. Of course ColdFire wouldn't even exist were it not for the vision and work of Ray Camden and Adam Podolnick. Thanks guys for letting me work on your project!
Be sure to vote for your favorite Open Source Project, and lot of other topics here.
With Firefox 3.5 in release candidate and Firebug 1.4 in its third beta release (after 31 alpha releases) I decided it was time to get my act together and update ColdFire to work with the latest and greatest. If you download ColdFire from the RIAForge site you will notice the zip now contains two releases: 1.3.207.211 and 1.4.207.218. The 1.3 release is the current "production" release which runs on Firefox 3.0 and Firebug 1.3. The 1.4 release should be considered beta since it requires Firebug 1.4, which will run on either Firefox 3.0 or 3.5. There are no new features in the 1.4 release, just support for these awesome new Firefox/Firebug releases. (The ColdFusion and Railo debugging templates are the same from 1.3 to 1.4, so if you want to run Firefox 3.0/Firebug 1.3 and Firefox 3.5/Firebug 1.4 side by side you don't have to change any of the server side ColdFire bits.)
I have to give a shout out to Jan "Honza" Odvarko for the great work he is doing on with Firebug's network monitoring. In earlier versions of ColdFire we actually rolled our own network monitoring and it was a huge pain. For ColdFire 1.2 we wised-up and used some crazy closure hacks to leverage Firebug's network monitor. It worked, allowing us to introduce features like the response queue, but boy was it ugly and brittle. Firebug 1.3 introduced a API for its NetworkMonitor module which allowed extension developers to register listeners and receive data from the network panel, which we in turn leveraged in ColdFire 1.3. Now Firebug 1.4 expands on that API, and best of all Honza has done a great job of documenting this expanded API on his blog. (Anyone interested in working with Firebug should definitely read Honza's blog, Software is Hard. I wish many of those articles had been written when I was digging through the Firebug code trying to figure things out.) ColdFire 1.4 has been updated to use this new API, which was the only significant change to ColdFire code for this release.
That's all for now. As always please report any issues on the RIAForge bug tracker.
In honor of Mark Drew's visit to the Philly CFUG last night, and Sean Corfield's announcement about the new Railo beta today, I've just posted a new version of ColdFire with a debugging template for Railo. This is a beta release. For more info on installation and what's supported in this release see my blog post on the RIAForge site.
Just a quick post to let folks know I've just uploaded a extension only update for ColdFire which fixes a stored procedure related issue with the DB Queries tab. Check out the RIAForge site for more info.
I just uploaded a new version of ColdFire to RIAForge. This release is an extension only update so there is no need to update the server bits.
Here is a quick rundown of what is new/fixed:
Also, one thing I noticed while working on this release is that the variables tab does not correctly display child components. If you have a component that extends another component, you will only see the methods defined on the child component and the display will not indicate that the component extends another component. I'll have to look into what can be done to fix this, but in the meantime it is something to be aware of if you depend on ColdFire to give you the API for a component.
As always, keep the bug reports and feature requests coming.
Yesterday uploaded the latest 1.3 release of ColdFire to RIAForge. Since it has been awhile since I've blogged about ColdFire here, I thought I'd take some time and share the new features that have been introduced in the 1.3 version of ColdFire.
Just a quick post to say that, thanks to a nudge from Ray, I finally got ColdFire listed on the Firebug Extensions page.
