It’s been way too long since I’ve written about an update to the Eclipse plugin. Quietly, some time back, I added a few niceties but never announced it. Recently, Denny Valliant of CFEclipse renown sent me a patch with several feature additions, and this prompted me to finish work on something long overdue in the plugin.

The new hotness:

1. RemoteFacade URL at any resource level… not just project. This is particularly useful if you separate your tests into “unit”, “integration”, and perhaps even “ui”. Now, you can stuff relevant functionality – ORM Reloading, Selenium server startup, etc – into a custom remote facade for a given folder of tests. Prior to this addition, custom RemoteFacades usually had gnarly logic to determine what type of test was being run and what action should be taken as a result. No more
2. In addition, when you set a custom remote facade, you can ping it from the Property page and get an HTML response back to confirm all is well
3. When you run a test in the plugin and something catastrophic happens – something the plugin can’t handle – you’ll now get a popup browser window showing you an HTML version of the error. This should help considerably in debugging communication problems between Eclipse and ColdFusion
4. The plugin no longer “hangs” Eclipse when it starts its initial communication with ColdFusion. Previously, if CF was shut down, or if it had just start up, attempting to run a test from the plugin would often hang the entire IDE while it waited for ColdFusion. No more.

For first-time installers: The update site url is http://mxunit.org/update

As always, if you hit any problems, let me know.

And, as always, if you have any problems figuring out how to configure the plugin, PLEASE click the green help icon in the plugin! In addition, see this page and its children on the MXUnit wiki for troubleshooting and other tips and tricks.

Finally, a huge “Thanks!” to Denny. You’re a code machine, bro.