So here is a fun question:
Why is the CFIDE directory called CFIDE?
To be honest, I had no idea. I pinged Damon Cooper and got a very interesting response:
Good one :)Tom Jordahl and I did a quick comparison of mental notes, and to the best of our "collective recollection", here's a bit of the history behind it:
Back before Allaire acquired the Homesite product from Nick Bradbury, a fully web-based ColdFusion administration AND development experience was envisioned. It was to use a combination of client-side Java and ColdFusion server-side code. The "/CFIDE" (or "ColdFusion Integrated Development Environment") directory was the designated location for this administrator and development environment.
Around ColdFusion 3.0, the CF Administrator shipped as a CF-based application for the first time, and RDS support came a bit later.
There was actually a prototype around somewhere, apparently (that was rumored to be tucked away in Patrick Muzila's desk drawer by the time I joined in Jan 1998) of the Java applet-based development environment, but it never shipped with the product. The RDS-based file browser Java applet, however, did ship as part of the Administrator, and is still used in the Administrator (for better or worse!) even today, using the "/CFIDE" directory.
For a number of reasons (not the least of which was the fact that client-side Java had it's share of issues), the web-based development environment was dropped in favor of what became ColdFusion Studio, based on the Bradbury Homesite product and code-base, which made a lot more sense, as a native desktop IDE with built-in RDS support.
This was a good call (IMO), but since those days the "/CFIDE" directory has persisted, and has become the default web-accessible location for Flash Form styles and themes, CF7 XML Form "skins" and layouts, Admin API, CFC Utils, debugging templates, Getting Started base (if installed), etc.
It has caused a bit of grief along the way, being case-sensitive on Unix, needs to be web-accessible in hosted environments for Flash Forms and the old CFFORM applets to work, etc, etc, but it's likely there to stay now, I think :)
(HINT: For a little "blast from the distant past", check out the contents of your {webroot}\CFIDE\classes\images directory, especially "cflogo.gif")
Damon
Cool story! For those who are curious, here is cflogo.gif (copyrighted by Macromedia, yada yada yada):
Archived Comments
I found a couple more old school images.
{webroot}\CFIDE\administrator\images\mmcoldfusion5.gif
and
{webroot}\CFIDE\administrator\images\mmneo.gif
Here's another one I can't believe we still ship...it was from CF5 Beta 1 Admin login page that was grabbed by the Neo (CFMX 6 project) guys, stamped with the "NEO" code name and has apparently we've shipped ever since...
We removed it from the CF5 Beta after we got feedback from customers that found it offensive that a symbol of American military dominance was used for the Admin login page...
{webroot}\CFIDE\administrator\images\homeimageneo.jpg
(Kinda embarrasing that's still in there...removing now...!)
Damon
That looks like an F/A-18. "A symbol of American military dominance"... LOL. You people crack me up.
Yeah, that's what a few of our customers told us, anyway, and so we removed it fomr the next CF5 Beta rather than potentially offend and.or alienate customers who might be sensitive to it.
The CF team thought it was kinda cool since one of the themes of CF5 was performance and scalability (vs CF 4.5), but hey... :)
Damon
Here is a question... how do I protect my administrator by moving it to a directory other than CFIDE? Is that even possible? And why not?
I've experimented w/ this and found that some things work, some don't.
Dont forget our friend the swf: CFIDE\administrator\images\neo.swf
That's kinda wild... I've never spent much time cruising thru the Administrator folders. See what I've been missing? All those beautious NEO and MX images? Classic!
Aside from the one left in the classes folder, there aren't any Allaire images though. Beyond that, however, I'm amazed at the number of references to Allaire still in there... at least in the encrypted pages everything starts with a reference to Allaire. In /CFIDE/scripts/wddx.js is Simeon Simeonov's old Allaire email address right next to "Copyright Macromedia."
Head over to /CFIDE/wizards/common/_logintowizard.cfm and you'll find a classic CFMX 6.0 login page (doesn't go anywhere, but it does render correctly).
There's all kinds of neat stuff in there...
Laterz,
J
Jeff,
I've been playing with alternate CFIDE folders to protect the administrator.
What I'm using is a copy of the CFIDE folder with the Administrator folder removed and an IIS Virtual Directory created in the website call CFIDE pointing to the Administrator-less CFIDE folder.
Seems to work for CFFORM support, haven't tried any of the other features that rely on CFIDE.
What's your experience?
dick
I'm old enough to remember "swf" meaning "single white female" :-)