Preview the Illudium Connector Bolt Extension

You may have read or heard about the announcement that Bolt (ColdFusion's new IDE) will allow you to write your own extensions (Ray has talked about his extensions recently). I personally don't think enough fuss has been made about this feature, probably because people don't know a lot about them yet. To clarify, you can create fully dynamic extensions with CFML - no need to learn any of the internals of Eclipse - and then add these onto things like the file view or the RDS DataView. When I first heard about this, I thought this would be a great way to tie an existing installation of the Illudium PU-36 Code Generator into the IDE within the RDS DataView. That extension is currently available on RIAForge for anyone with access to Bolt right now or, if you don't yet have access, its there for when a public beta happens (no, I don't have a clue when that might be).

In general writing extensions is pretty easy, and I hope to talk about it more down the road. This particular extension had some complications. One of those was that the existing API for Illudium uses your ColdFusion Administrator password to access the AdminAPI for datasource names and types. Since you already enter that to access the RDS panels, it seemed silly and redundant of me to ask it again. Therefore, I bypass much of the existing service and get the information I need via the current code utilizing <cfdbinfo>. It's a bit of a hack, but until I get around to rewriting the Illudium API, it'll have to suffice. You do need to have a working copy of Illudium installed on your local machine for this plugin to work however.

Anyway, if you are curious what this extension looks like in action, click the image below and it will show you a video I made with Jing that shows me using the extension to generate code against the default Illudium template. The panel that comes up with the standard form for generating with Illudium does indeed populate the list of templates dynamically at runtime - that's the beauty of these extensions being built in CFML. I am really excited to see what people build for Bolt extensions as I think these initial ones are only going to be the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's possible.