An Adobe AIR application that brings the ColdFusion 8 documentation to your desktop that is surprising small, easy to use, extremely fast, and built using the Ext JavaScript library.

News

v 1.0 - Initial release of CFDocs on AIR, published on February 19, 2008 on the Web Biz blog. This release contains some minor bugs that are being worked on.

See it in action

Here are some screen shots of CFDocs on AIR v1.0:

The splash page you'll see when you first start the application.
Searching for functions and tags is extremely handy and fast.
List of all ColdFusion 8 functions with brief descriptions.
Browse through all the ColdFusion 8 tags.

How it works

Wondering how I built CFDocs on AIR? Well, if you're curious, I'll try to explain some of the techniques used.

First, lets talk about the technologies that CFDocs on AIR was built with:

Obviously, Adobe AIR makes it all possible with their cross-platform runtime with an integrated local database using sqlite. CFDocs on AIR was built using all asynchronous file and database queries, allowing JavaScript to continue processing while waiting for the file to be opened or the data to be returned.

The Ext JS library provides all the cool UI elements, with the exception of the search input box. Additionally, several JavaScript methods encapsulated within the Ext.onReady function provides all navigation, searching, and linking features. Lastly, ColdFusion 8 (developer edition on my MBP) was utilized to grab all the content off the Adobe Livedocs site and store it into the sqlite database using the sqlite JDBC connector.

Install

You can use the flash installer or just download the CFDocs.air file. Of course, be sure you have installed Adobe AIR.

Why?

This application was originally created because I wanted to learn what AIR was all about, and this seemed like a great excuse to learn. This also gave me a nice project to work on that would benefit the ColdFusion community, and showcase the power of AIR.