pf » The name is not a valid component name

I got a somewhat misleading error message today, it went something like this:

The name is not a valid component name. Component names cannot start or end with dots.

My component name did not have any dots in it, and I was trying to access it through the component browser.

It turns out the error message wasn't bad english, they were trying to tell me that the name "" is not a valid component name. I used the CFC wizard in cfeclipse to create the component, and it added an empty extends attribute. I submitted this as bug #180 to the cfeclipse project.

I posted this for two reasons first so that anyone else who gets this error message doesn't have to spend as much time as I did figuring out why. And second so that Macromedia and New Atlanta can take note of these poor error messages. It would have been a bit easier to debug if they wrapped the name of the component with quotes. Descriptive error messages go a long ways to simplify application development.