ColdFusion developers have quite a few options when wanting to access full help documentation for ColdFusion 8 including:
- Livedocs
- CFQuickdocs
- ColdFusionDocs.com
- CFDocs on AIR
- CFML Reference Docs for the iPod
- ColdFusion 8 Help Files for Eclipse
The ’source’ of all these is the same (Livedocs) so which do you go with? Funnily enough the offical Adobe Livedocs is probably the last one I’d choose simply because it’s a little slow 
CFQuickdocs was one of the first non-adobe help sites that I became aware of (and was for CF7 I believe). It’s still great and uses Ajax to speed things up but the newer ColdFusionDocs.com is even quicker with a cool Flex interface!
Of course CFDocs on AIR is fantastic (can’t beat running locally!) unless you’re working on Linux then you need to wait for Adobe to release AIR for Linux 
Today I added the help docs for Eclipse from the cfdevtools page. All you need to do is copy the .jar file into your Flex Builder or Eclipse installation’s plugins folder then restart Eclipse and you’re good to go.
This is great to have the ColdFusion docs locally right at your fingertips open in a separate Eclipse window (click “Help -> Dynamic Help”). Another reason why Eclipse is the premier IDE for ColdFusion developers.
9 Comments
I dont know why people always say livedocs is slow, its very “fast” for me.
I think it has something to do with it loading in a frameset, so you initially see the page you want (from a google search) but then you see it all reload into the frameset.
That and Google always gives you results for ColdFusion 6.1, hasn’t Adobe stopped supporting that version?
Either way, a local copy is really handy and so much more convenient than an ‘online’ version.
btw LiveDocs for CF8 are MUCH better than they ever were for previous versions.
What file for eclipse/cfeclipse will give the tag insite for the CF8 tags?
@Scot – Not sure which ‘file’ you mean. All this is bundled in cfeclipse on installation (or update).
There is a cf8.xml in the eclipse/plugins/org.cfeclipse.cfml_x.x.x.x/dictionary/ folder.
Is that the one you mean?
I always use a local version of LiveDocs, much faster. Also, if need be I can develop if the Internet goes out at the office; which has been known to happen.
Just so you know, Coldfusiondocs.com does not rely on livedocs…so if livedocs goes down, you would still have coldfusiondocs working
I’m confused about how to install the CF8 Help Files for Eclipse. The instructions here and on the page to download say to copy the JAR file to the plugins folder. There is no JAR file in the download – it is a ZIP with many HTML and XML files. What do I do with this?
@Anuj – Nice, I’m sure that makes them much quicker. Still, the information is all coming from LiveDocs was more what I was getting at. Good to know though
@Eric – The jar file is located here: http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/8/com.adobe.coldfusion_help_8_1.0.1.jar