Recently I decided to try the CFEclipse plugin, for ColdFusion development. If you haven't tried it, I suggest you do. The guys working on it have done a great job (make sure you try the bleeding edge build).

Anyway, When I started playing around with eclipse I realized the thing I like most is the ability to completely switch directions during development. I can be in the CF view, switch to a SQL Enterprise Manager view, do a little UML modeling, head over to Java, and back to CF. All without leaving my editor. This was very appealing to me. Funny thing, for as good as eclipse is for editing cfml, js, as, sql, etc.. I don't like it for java development (which it started out as an editor for). After using IntelliJ IDEA editor, I found eclipse to be frustrating for java. That could just be me too.

Anyways, this got me thinking, considering how powerful this plugin architecture is and how many resources their were to help a developer write a plugin. Well... I had to take a crack at writing one.

So what did I write, I wrote a ColdFusion Log Viewer plugin. This simple plugin understands and can parse the ColdFusion log format, it will also keep a connection open and update automatically when new errors are logged. (like the unix tail command), and it supports multiple log folders on a server, great if you run multiple instances of CF.

For full details, check it out here