I was digging around the Aptana forums today and noticed a few posts where people were looking for ColdFusion support from within Aptana – either by Aptana adding in the language support themselves or possibly by merging with CFEclipse!
Mark Drew made a few comments on the forum about how you can easily run the two plugins side by side but there were some good arguments presented for merging:
- More people able to work on CFEclipse
- Better integration of HTML/CSS/JS support while editing CFML files
- Better support
I started thinking – why doesn’t Adobe simply buy Aptana? :)
I didn’t know much about Aptana but it is really interesting to read their About Us page…
Aptana was founded by Paul Colton in 2005. Prior to starting Aptana, Paul Colton founded several technology companies including Live Software. At Live Software, Paul helped define the Servlet API specification and also created JRun, the leading commercial Servlet and JSP engine.
Small world, huh?
Now there would be the huge issue of Aptana being in the same space as Dreamweaver though I really see DW being more of a designer tool, and CFEclipse/Aptana as a developer tool. I would use Notepad before I used Dreamweaver again.
I’m on the fence – while I’d like to see faster development on CFEclipse – I’m not sure merging it with Aptana would gain much… Thoughts??
Purely from how it would benefit me, I would say sure. While you can switch between the two, it would be handy very handy not to.
That said it isn’t really my place to make demands. :-) Mark does a great job with cfeclipse and I really appreciate everything thus far. Regarding Adobe… would be interesting… but it should remain free.
CFEclipse runs great for me in Aptana although it did take some tweaking to get the shortcuts working correctly.
Best part is I can open files simply by double clicking them in Finder / Windows Explorer which is something I was never able to figure out with Eclipse.
I’d welcome anything that would finally bring decent FTP support to cfeclipse!!
I like that Apatana has dojo and other JS library integration… and the nice bits that it provides…
The the real crux of the issue is developers (java) who are willing and, moreso, excited, to contribute to a quality CF IDE.
I doubt that just by merging with another project- (there’s also Web Tools Platform- anyone thought about how cool a ‘real’ eclipse project that supported CF, and worked with the rest of the eclipse stuff, like TPTP, etc., would be?)- as I was saying, I doubt that merging is enough. We need people who want to contribute.
I think, just by people seeing that it’s not impossible to add things they want, that we’ll get more people who want to contribute. If we do it right.
But the real important bit that I’m trying to get to, is that it’s the community, as much as anything else, that keeps these projects alive. Open Source Fuel, ya know- People.
Frankly, with the ties to Java, I’m pretty surprised there aren’t more CF/JAVA folks rolling up their sleeves and getting involved, no matter what happens with the project itself.
It would be cool if we could just hook into the java editor, in some manner- probably not impossible, I’d think.
Eh. Just some thoughts I’ve been thinking about as well…
Why would you want to merge projects?
Aptana is not a project for starters, but a commercial compant, and have a recent history of license flip-flops.
Then the Eclipse plugin architecture allows those to run side by side nicely inside one IDE.
Merging would be terrible imho.
I think Mark has proved that he is pretty good at being a one man crew. The scope of building a “competitive” IDE is bigger than one man can handle. My favorite javaScript library is free, but many people take part. (jQuery) … behind that I like extJS which is part commercial.
My point is first that it takes more than one part time programmer to give us something that competes with other solutions that are out for other server solutions. Integrated source control, and more. We have come a long way… but to integrate with Aptana would only be too cool IMO.
Again, CFE has come a long way. It would be great to see the ability to integrate help files, tag editors the way we have them in DW and HS. Yet, Aptana hasn’t added this feature yet either. DW is not first a server IDE so it will never do things like building a debugger for CF into the IDE, or adding a plugin. Thus it seems that pragmatically even Adobe has walked the path that tells us Eclipse is a better IDE solution.
Sooo… what’s next with CFE? Will we see more work done in that any time soon? Perhaps we will hear something at MAX?
P.S.
I use CFEclipse installed in an Aptana editor currently.
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While I’ve jumped back into Eclipse / CFEclipse yet again – the pull of the various developer tools is strong – I am still not 100% happy with it as my primary CF editor compared to Dreamweaver 8 / CS3.
The reasons for this are as follows:
1. Slow code completion
While CFEclipse is top notch, it’s code completion is not. It takes a good second or so to popup with tag attributes whereas DW is lighting past the second you press the key of the first letter. I don’t think this is an Eclipse limitation as Aptana has very fast code completion.
2. No CSS completion
I really find the CSS tag completion a godsend in DW when working with inline styles. Obviously working in a seperate style sheet (thus open to Aptana control) would solve this, but I still use inline styles for quick padding etc. Sometimes inline styling is unavoidable.
Ok, so only two reasons there and compared to the feature set CFEclipse / Eclipse / Aptana provide they are pretty small, but they do make me want to jump back to DW at certain times of frustration.
I think if these were fixed or some of the featureset of Aptana was merged into .cfm editing some how, we’d have the ultimate IDE for CF.