When grabbing the new ColdFusion 8 server, don't forget to pick up the plugins for Eclipse. Adobe has had CFML plugins for Eclipse for a little while now (although you had to download Flex Builder 2 to get them). But this new version adds some new cool new tools. One of them is the Log Viewer.
Mike Nimer created the log viewer a few years back. I'm not sure if Adobe picked up his code or started fresh, but this tool is now bundled in with the rest of the plugins.
In case you don't know what it does - let me describe it. First you specify a folder to monitor. Typically you will want to monitor your ColdFusion logs folder. Eclipse will list all the log files in the folder. When you select a file, you will see the last few lines displayed.
What's nice though is that as the log file changes, the display is automatically updated. So if you are using cflog for debugging, you can use Eclipse to visually monitor the file. (For Unix guys, you may recognize this as the Tail command.)
Archived Comments
Very nice, thanks for the info.
Jay
I'll have to check this out. Unfortunately, I read in the lab forum that the Flex and AJAX wizards will not run on Mac Eclipse. Why is that the case?
Lola, the query builder has some Windows specific code, so it (and anything that uses it, like the wizards) won't work on Mac. For now.
--- Ben
Lola - you _can_ use the db browser though. This lets you see db tables, columns, etc. That's all you really need. ;)
I've tried Mike Nimer's version before. Ran into a problem with it taking forever to load when viewing large log files. Any idea if the Adobe one works around this somehow or would it run into the same issue, meaning it's probably time I sorted out some kinda log rotation.
I didn't try a large text file so I don't know. Of course, CF makes it easy to rotate the logs. :)
Ray,
I can cofirm a little. The CF team did pick up my code and take it over. I'm not sure how much they updated or modified it - but they did start with it..
---nimer
It really is a handle extension to Eclipse, the live monitoring is particularly useful. Would be nice if you could order by column though. And perhaps a filtering facility would come in handy.
Screenshot images are broken.
Thanks for the article; this log view is great (beats hunting down the file and running a tail on it).
Old blog entry. :) As an FYI, a log viewer ships with Adobe's new ColdFusion Builder IDE.