Some (unfinished) thougts on IDE's for ColdFusion

Posted At : January 9, 2008 3:34 AM | Posted By : Trond Ulseth
Related Categories: ColdFusion, Eclipse

I guess everybody now have heard about and taken the ColdFusion IDE survey which hopefully will be used by Adobe to create a official editor.

Some time ago I forced myself to change from DreamWeaver over to CFEclipse - and for the most part I don't look back. But I do have very mixed feelings on the whole Eclipse deal. It feels kind of bloated. And also I'm not to happy to deal with different plugins for different purposes, that still sometimes step on each others toes. And then there is the different versions of plugins not playing with the same versions of Eclipse. At the same time I really like to have SVN, debugging etc. right there in my editor.

Today I accidentally found out about CFTextmate, and the screen cast impressed me. Very nice.

I then found out that due to lack of further development of CFTextmate, that Neil Middleton has created a "new version" called Coldfusion for Textmate, which will have support for CF8, BlueDragon as well as many of the ColdFusion frameworks out there.

So I'm not sure what I'll end up with in the end, but I'm kinda hoping that Adobe will take all the best aspects from DreamWeaver (without all the design bloat), Eclipse/CFEclipse, and the TextMate based ones, and have it feature rich enough (SVN etc.) and at the same time "simple" enough. Not an easy task indeed, as every developer will have their own view on what features needs to be in there and how it should or should not work. But if there should be any point in Adobe releasing a CF IDE it needs to be better than what's available now.

So I'm crossing my fingers and wait impatiently.

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Nice post! I love the screen-cast for CFTextMate. I'm very similar in my transition between editors and have come from Homesite -> Dreamweaver -> Eclipse -> Dreamweaver! ... I liked the plugins in Eclipse but I just simply like the feel of Dreamweaver more and it's plugins have been sufficient up to this stage - at the same time I think with most IDEs there is always that bloat factor where plenty of features exist that you just simply don't need. It will be very interesting to see the outcome of the CF IDE Servey I think. Very exciting indeed!

Anyways! Thanks again - I had not head of CfTextMate but I'm def. going to be giving it a shot tomorrow at work! :)

Steve

# Posted By Steve Glachan | 1/9/08 5:14 AM

I agree with pretty much everything you are saying. However, I think if Adobe does develop a CF IDE, it will probably be in Eclipse. Adobe now has such ties with Eclipse, and they also have already written the Coldfusion plugin set for Eclipse. I assume that they probably would follow the methodology of the FlexBuilder team and have a standalone as well as a plugin version.

# Posted By David Tucker | 1/9/08 7:26 AM

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