The Best Online Guide to the ColdFusion Debugger
Posted 16 August 2010
Charlie Arehart is an indefatigable contributor to the ColdFusion community. He always manages to dig through the dark and unexplored corners of CF and CF-related products, and comes up with some excellent gems and insights along the way.
One area of ColdFusion development that still remains something of a black art to me is getting the debugger in ColdFusion Builder (or, previously, CFEclipse/Eclipse) up and running. The official CF docs aren’t particularly great on this front. While they give you the basics of setting up the debugger, they don’t cover all the little details and gotchas that can make getting the debugger to run seem like the darkest of Dark Arts.
Today, Charlie posted an awesome, detailed guide to setting up and using the ColdFusion Debugger. It’s in a PDF which contains three chapters from the ColdFusion 9 Web Application Construction Kit, Volume 2, that weren’t included in the final version of the book because of page count limitations.
I’ve read a number of blog entries, the official docs, and even a Fusion Authority guide to using the debugger in CFBuilder, but none are as clear or detailed as Charlie’s guide. He covers the issues with setup (especially if you’re on a multi-server install or debugging against a remote server) and the details of the sometimes persnickety debug session itself. It should be your first (and probably only) read if you want to get started with CF debugging.
If you download the PDF, you also get a chapter on Globalization and one on Error Handling. Sweet!