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:

• Total execution time is now shown on general tab.
• Users can choose to have the execution times tab show the totals at the top, using the new "Exec Time Totals on Top" option.
• Fixed issue where components with no methods would break variables output.
• Fixed user preferences (selected options) so that they are now persisted.

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.

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Just a quick post to say that, thanks to a nudge from Ray, I finally got ColdFire listed on the Firebug Extensions page.

Recently I went back to doing Flex work and one of the things I immediately missed was ColdFire. So I decided to take a look to see what could be done to get my favorite debugging tool working with CF powered Flex applications. Turns out it wasn't all that hard. First though, check out the video below to get an idea of what I'm talking about. (Sorry, no sound as I recorded this at work.)

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Release 1.2.117.126

Last night I released a new version of ColdFire, 1.2.117.126. This is an extension only bug fix release which:

• fixed issues with execution times tab summary rows (issues 42 and 44)
• fixed issue with variables tab (issue 43)
• improved multiple tab support.

Release 1.2.117.117

I also realized I never announced the previous 1.2.117.117 release on this blog. That release had quite a few improvements and new features which I'll detail below.

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A new version of ColdFire is up on RIAForge. This is an extension only update that fixes a bug related to JSON serialization/deserialization of queryparam values.

The problem was reported and fixed by Shane Bradly. He noticed that he was not seeing the SQL for some of his queries in the ColdFire Query tab. His investigation found that passing a numeric value for a text queryparam type such as cf_sql_varchar or cf_sql_char caused the following JavaScript in the ColdFire extension to fail:

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Just a quick post to announce that I'll be speaking about "Debugging ColdFusion Web Applications using Firebug and ColdFire" at the ColdFusion Unconference. If you're going to MAX this year and want to find out more about what Firebug and ColdFire can do for you, come check out my session.