A long awaited update on coldfusiondocs.com

On January 30, 2012, in ColdFusion, Javascript, by Anuj Gakhar

I launched coldfusiondocs.com in December, 2007 and back then, it was a Flex based app. I got feedback from several people and everyone liked the app. However, for the past year or so, I have not been able to give it the time and attention that it deserves for several reasons. I have been keeping busy on other stuff, got distracted for months at a time due to personal and professional reasons, are only a couple of reasons amongst others. Several people have contacted me asking me why the app is not available anymore, as it has been down for a good few months now, well, maybe close to an year.

So, after a very long wait, here is the update :-

A few weeks ago, I started thinking on the lines of whether I even want to continue this project or not, whether I should try and update it or simply close it down given the numerous amounts of other CF documentation resources available already:-

The above resources are what I can find as of today, maybe there are others around that I don’t know about or have missed any, so let me know if I have.

So, while I was in this dilemma of whether to continue the project or not, I also had the thought of learning something new this year, along the lines of HTML5/CoffeeScript/Some JS frameworks etc….and that is when I thought, I can use this opportunity to simply rewrite ColdFusionDocs.com using HTML5/JS. This will give me the chance to learn something new and keep the project alive at the same time. So, I decided to use CoffeeScript, LESS, Twitter Bootstrap 2 and some of the features in HTML5 to rewrite this project and I am happy to say that the first version is now up and running.

This is only the very first release and does not include all the features that I want it to have. So far, I have been able to load the documentation and apply the version filter. That’s pretty much it for now. The source code is available on github and as always, feel free to fork, comment or contribute in any way you can or want. The good thing about this is that this is now also available in iOS devices simply because it’s not a Flex app anymore. I wish to add a few more features like deep linking using HTML5, adding the Railo docs to the mix etc. However, based on past experience, time is always an issue. So, not sure of any deadlines on anything but let’s just say, those are the things I have in mind.

The app works in a very simple way. I took the CF documentation that comes bundled with ColdFusion Builder and uploaded it to a S3 bucket. I took the TOC XML that comes bundled with ColdFusion Builder, modified it to remove unwanted stuff and add the versioning and then used that to load all the left hand navigation. The reason it’s fast is it’s simply loading a .html file from a S3 bucket, there’s no heavy parsing/searching involved at all. For any more insight on how it works, feel free to contact me.

Anyways, not sure if anyone will use this app or not, I am just taking it as a learning exercise for now and in the process, if someone finds it useful, then there’s nothing like that!

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4 Responses to A long awaited update on coldfusiondocs.com

  1. Jon Joyce says:

    Great to see it make a come back and using some tech. One small improvement i’d like to suggest would be making using of the hash tag for the url, would help for quick look ups, for example: http://coldfusiondocs.com/#cffile

  2. Rustam says:

    Thank Anuj, this still relevant, and very useful

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