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I finally found a bit of time to sit down and pull out some results from the CFML IDE survey:

393 Results (4/9 - 4/28)

1. Which of these describes your role best as a CFML user?
- Application Developer (172)
- Web Developer (129)
- Application Architect (60)
- Other included “superdude” and “all around scrub”

2. Which IDE(s) do you currently use for CFML development?
- CFEclipse (319)
- Dreamweaver (133)
- Eclipse (118)
- Homesite/CFStudio (91)
- Flexbuilder (82)
- Other - Aptana, Notepad++

3. What is your platform of choice for development?
- Windows (320)
- Mac (101)
- Linux (57)

4. Which features in your IDE do you most commonly/frequently use during development?
- Syntax highlighting of code (351)
- File Explorer (237)
- Help for CFTags/Functions (220)
- HTML editing (217)
- Source code control (205)
- CSS editing (160)
- Javascript editing (94)

5. How important are the following features for you in a CFML IDE?
Must Have:
- Syntax high-lighting of code (288)
- HTML editing (237)
- CSS editing (210)
- Javascript editing (199)
- Help for CFTags/Functions (193)
- Source code control (185)

Very Important:
- Integrated debugger (124)
- Framework Support (121)
- Intelisense on CFCs (114)

Useful:
- Integrated CFC explorer (161)
- Integrated log viewer (146)
- Integrated CRUD wizard (126)

Nice To Have:
- Integrated RDS data explorer (104)
- Customizable code coloring (83)
- Simplified Flex/Air development (71)

Unnecessary:
- Integrated CRUD wizard (71)
- Integrated RDS data explorer (50)
- Simplified Flex/Air development (31)

6. What in your opinion would be the right price range for CFML IDE?
- Under $100 (138)
- $100-500 (124)
- Free (109)

7. What features would you like to see added as one click install to an CFML IDE?
- Source control (294)
- XML tools (240)
- Documentation generation tools (220)
- Diff / compare tools (216)
- Unit testing tools (203)
- Other: “The ability to harness the magical powers of the internet.”

Still disappointed in the low number of results.  According to this recent article in Infoworld…

Adobe officials cited analyst estimates of 400,000 developers using ColdFusion

So 400 results seems a tad low.  So either people just ignored the survey, or there is a huge number of ColdFusion developers that don’t know about my blog :)  I’d love to know what kind of results Adobe got on their IDE survey.

I’ve been using jQuery more and more at work but have been having to hold off some of the more advanced uses because of accessibility concerns. Working with the Government we are looking more and more at 508 and accessibility and right now AJAX is a bit of a gray area.

Today John Resig (author of jQuery) has a great blog post about Ajax Accessibility in which he discusses Google’s use of ARIA in Google Reader and also mentions  Fire Vox:

Fire Vox is an open source, freely available talking browser extension for the Firefox web browser. Think of it as a screen reader that is designed especially for Firefox.

In addition to the basic features that are expected of screen readers, such as being able to identify headings, links, images, etc. and providing navigational assistance, Fire Vox provides support for MathML and CSS speech module properties. It also works on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.

I’ll certainly be setting this up today to give it a whirl! If you are interesting in accessibility, 508, and AJAX I’d check out John’s post!