I’ve been using Coldfusion Builder now since the first beta and have to admit that I’ve been converted. I come out of the Dreamweaver world, which still has some features that I’m still very fond of that I don’t find in the Eclipse build. Before Coldfusion Builder was released I did download Eclipse and install the Coldfusion extensions, played with it little bit, and then went back to Dreamweaver to never return. That is until Coldfusion Builder was released. An IDE just for me I thought, how special.

Anyways, I’ve been using Coldfusion Builder ever since.  So while using the Services Browser may sound repetitive for the seasoned Eclipse user, I wanted to post about it anyways to make life easier for those like me.  So when you open Coldfusion Builder you get a set of panels with tabs on the bottom.  One of these tabs is called ‘Services Browser’.  If you don’t see it you can go to the Windows > Show View > Services Browser.

Once you have the panel open you should see a list of all the cfc packages on your server that is configured for Coldfusion Builder.  You can further expand each package to show the individual cfcs in each package, and then each function in an individual cfc, and on to each argument required by each function.  You can right click these options to insert cfobject tags or script or cfinvoke tags.  This is a huge timesaver as it writes everything except for the value of the arguments to be passed to the given function.

I’ve included a short video to help better demonstrate this feature. Click here to watch.