Getting Started with CFBuilder - A Question About Project Settings

[Homestar9]

Hello All,

I'm just getting my feet wet with CFBuilder and giving it a spin after over a decade's worth of experience with Dreamweaver and I have a question about setting up my work environment.

First of all, I have two computers that I mainly work from.  My home desktop computer, and a laptop for when I'm on the road.  I keep all of my web site project files syncronized between the two computers using Dropbox.

I've noticed that when I create a new project in CFBuilder it stores a few files in my project root like ".project" and "settings.xml".  It looks like "settings.xml" stores information about which CFBuilder web server should be used for the project.  Unfortunately this messes things up for me a bit because on my desktop a web site project url might be:  http://desktop/myProject/ and on my laptop the project url could be http://laptop/myProject.

The reason this isn't a problem in Dreamweaver is because dreamwevaer stores its configuration/preferences outside of my project folders so I can essentially define any testing server I want for both the desktop and laptop.

Is there a way to configure CFBuilder to store project settings outside of the project folder?  Or does anyone have a suggestion for someone like me who syncronizes their project files from their laptop to their desktop?

Thanks in advance for helping out a CFBuilder noob.

[Carl Von Stetten]

I would recommend using a distributed version control system (DVCS) with a hosted service, such as using Git/Mercurial and Github/BitBucket/UnFuddle.  With Git, you can use a .ignore file to specify files/folders that you want to exclude from being stored in version control (I also exclude my CFBuilder project files from my repositories).  You would then sync your local Git repositories with your service of choice, and they would be accessible from any machine. 

There are many advantages of using Git and a hosted service over just Dropbox:

1. Each computer has a complete copy of the code repository, including all code changes over the history of your project.
2. You store code modifications in "commits", or small entries in the DVCS.
3. Commits can contain user-defined descriptions that help you identify what you did at each step of your development process
4. You can roll back commits if you break something in your code.
5. You can create "branches" of your code when you want to work on a specific feature of your application, and that branch is kept in isolation from other branches until you are ready to merge it back into the main production code branch.
6. You can have public or private hosted repositories on the various services, enabling you to work with a team or participate in open-source development.
7. There are Eclipse plugins available for CFBuilder that provide GUI tools for working with Git and hosted repositories (unless you are comfortable with using the command-line to do all your Git interactions).

I don't think you can separate the project settings from the project in CFBuilder.

[Homestar9]

Thank you for the suggestion Carl.  I'll look into playing around with Github and see if something like that would work well.