Clean Host

I thought it'd be fun to put out a series of setting up a development environment on you local machine. 

Once upon a time, 10 years ago, all of my development was done from a desktop machine and hosted on a staging version of our website.  That's nice and all, and it worked because I was an army of just one.  Somewhere in the mid piont of the 2000s, it became apparent that I'd need to start hosting this stuff locally, and so began my neverending journey to the perfect dev setup on my laptop.  I'll lay out what I presently use, and maybe someone can take solace in my work.  I've geared this towards windows as, well, it's what I use.  Most of the same information applies to other OS's, but it's not something I can tackle this time around.

The basics we'll go through will be:

• Eclipse - for developing code, CSS, XML, JS, etc.
• Java JDK  6 - required for Eclipse
• CFEclipse - CFML IDE plugin for eclipse
• Subclipse - plugin to eclipse for talking to subversion
• Aptana - plugin to eclipse for HTML development, CSS, JS, etc.  Also includes FTP abilities.
• Adobe CF - Installed in multi-server mode, with CF9 and CF8 running on JRun
• Railo - Latest Railo version on Tomcat 6
• Apache - For serving our content.  Yes, I know, Tomcat can do this as well.  But I prefer Apache
• IIS - Maybe.  I've mostly given up on IIS, and don't use it on any of my machines at present.
• MySQL 5.x - database engine of choice
• MSSQL 2008 R2 - because I've still got some clients on MSSQL.
• Oracle - Maybe.  We'll see.  I have to use it, but you shouldn't be forced into it.

To start us off, we'll grab and configure eclipse.  As a note, everything we do will be going into c:\cf_dev.  Adjust as needed.

• Go get eclipse, I grabbed the java developer as it was the smallest.  At the time of this writing, we're at 3.7 of eclipse. http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.7.1-201109091335/index.php
• Unzip the contents to c:\cf_dev.  You'll end up with a folder called c:\cf_dev\eclipse
• Go grab a Java JDK from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk-6u29-download-513648.html. I grabbed a 1.6 version.
• Install it to C:\cf_dev\jdk1.6.0_29\.  We'll use this later for our J2EE server
• Fire up eclipse, c:\cf_dev\eclipse\eclipse.exe, and make the workspace c:\cf_dev\projects.  All of our projects will go into this folder.
• Install the CFEclipse plugin.  Briefly, open up Help-> Install New Software in eclipse.  Add a new site, I choose the preview for CFEclipse http://cfeclipse.org/update-preview, but you can also use http://cfeclipse.org/update.
• After clicking Add... you'll need to supply a name.  I used cfeclipse, as it's all crazy descriptive like that.
• You'll see a check box and CFEclipse CFML Editor.  Check it, and click the Next button.  Follow the prompts and accept the license to complete the installation.
• We're going to repeat this process, but the new software to install is Aptana at http://download.aptana.com/studio3/plugin/install
• Repeat the process again to install subclipse, http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.8.x
• Open the Aptana view, Window-> Perspective-> Web.  You'll be prompted about missing GIT.  I installed the portable copy.

And we're done!  One of the nice things that the Aptana studio brings is working with both the file system, or by project, in the left hand tab.  For now, create a new project (you should see create proejct) and call it site1.  Make sure to choose the CFML type of project.  It'll default to our c:\cf_dev\projects folder.  If asked to change to the CFEclipse perspective, I choose "no" as I spend 100% of my time in the Aptana perspective.  We'll grab the Adobe install next time around.