I was checking out this CFUnited post on what people are looking forward to seeing at CFUnited. This comment from Marc Escher caught my eye:
Question: A recent hot topic?
Marc: One that doesn’t get much press but which is on the minds of many is whether Adobe’s going to come out with a CF IDE. It’s been hinted at in blogs but in typical fashion is carried out with the same degree of teasing that 8th grade girls use. It’s frustrating for some of us who would choose to contribute to CFEclipse if we thought that product had a long life. I believe Adobe’s hurting the CF community by not either a) committing to building an IDE or b) stopping the chatter entirely and getting behind CFEclipse. After working with FlexBuilder and seeing the productivity gains you get from it with Flex, you can’t help but feel that we’re crippled, productivity-wise, by lack of an enterprise-class IDE for CF.
I’m curious if others who might consider contributing to the CFEclipse project are hesitant to do so for this reason??
I do wish Adobe would “s–t or get off the pot” as my Mom is prone to say, about whether they are or are not developing a CF IDE.
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The Are You Sitting On The Fence Waiting For A CF IDE From Adobe? by Jim , unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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16 Comments
I don’t understand the need for a ColdFusion IDE. ColdFusion isn’t a presentation technology. Adobe could add more ColdFusion integration into Dreamweaver I suppose, but an entirely new IDE just for ColdFusion seems a bit too much for me.
@Jeff – I’m curious what do you currently write your CFML with?
Jeff, have you used FlexBuilder or another similar IDE? Because once you do, the amazing productivity gains will probably make more sense. Things like automatic introspection and code hinting for CFCs, built-in refactoring tools, and real-time error flagging are needed badly.
Java’s not a presentation technology, either. I use eclipse for java development, and it’s almost as if it’s a different product entirely when compared with using it for CF. The refactoring support, the “Quick Fix” stuff, seeing the type and call hierarchy, finding workspace references to types, method-level mylyn integration….
Now, granted, this kind of thing is made much more difficult by CF’s dynamic typed nature. But still… the eclipse DLTK project is opening many doors for scripting languages like CF, so who knows what’s possible?
OK… there are other possibilities. How about expanding the solutions? We have a project to be released at CFUnited during our BOF session on COOP. Yes this is a COOP specific browser based IDE for CF. (Oh, public beta, not “final product”) If people jump over to http://d2o.riaforge.org they can check out some screen shots and the road map. (Yes we still support using CFE… we just find we need to use it less than before.)
I think Jeff – like many people – is confusing an IDE with a visual rendering system like Dreamweaver. And that’s a common misconception from what I’ve heard in the last few years.
At the Scotch conference last year Mark Drew did a really good presentation on CFEclipse and ended up fielding questions like “will it have a visual editor for drawing tables” and so on – which isn’t what it’s there to do.
@Jeff – I agree there is some confusion about what is, and isn’t an IDE.
I have always been puzzled by the CF team’s paranoia when it comes to talking about upcomming products. It seems they are scared that they’ll give their competition (New Atlanta, etc.) a head start if they divulge too many details early on. But if you look at Microsoft and other big IT companies, they don’t seem to care. Microsoft tells the world about planned features in upcoming upgrades VERY early on. I too wish Adobe would get over this paranoia and give us more details.
@Jake – I agree. For some things I can certain see a bit of mystery – but an IDE? Everyone knows a) we need one, b) what features it needs.
And there is no competition besides open-source alternatives (Go CFEclipse!)
I think Adobe would be much better off getting community input upfront vs. building something secretly and rolling it out as a surprise (ie Dreamweaver). But it’s Adobe and despite their recent rash of ‘open-sourceness’ – I’m not going to hold my breath.
Agreed! We do need an IDE. Take a look at what Microsoft has for .NET. They have an IDE that is really good. That’s exactly what we need.
I vote for an Adobe CF IDE but it has to be amazing. I’ve been waiting for one ever since they halted development of Homesite. CFEclipse is my tool of choice to date.
The challenge I think for Adobe is that so many developers expect the CF IDE to be free. Unless Adobe releases an AMAZING CF IDE, the price to many developers may not be worth switching to.
@Vince – in the CFIDE survey I posted – it was split about even between: Free, $0-100 and $100-500. So the majority of people ARE willing to pay something.
I have to be honest, I’ve been using CF Studio 5 for coding until very recently (the past month). I just switched my team over to Eclipse 3.3.2 with CFEclipse… We’re all experiencing growing pains, but for the most part CFEclipse is a decent solution. (Though I do miss some of the ColdFusion creature comforts in studio 5.)
There are so many articles out now about how open source is killing Pay IDEs. Vince and Jim both make interesting points above. A new CF IDE tool from Adobe won’t be a profit center. It’s an “added value” tool… an investment in a good IDE will encourage more people to use ColdFusion. To make it competitive, it should be free… though Jim is right, I’d pay $50 or so for a decent editor.
Speaking of good IDEs… One thing I don’t get is why Dreamweaver and Eclipse don’t use the “folders on top, files on bottom” tree model. I hate having folders and files in the same tree – especially when I have TONS of files and I’m constantly switching between two different parent folders. What used to be a fast click is now a bunch of horizontal and vertical scrolling.
@Brien – it’s been so long since I’ve used Homesite I forgot about the over/under file manager.
In Eclipse I’m really getting used to using Working Sets and the “Go Into” feature to minimize the number of files I see…
Has anyone looked under the hood of cfeclipse? I mean, really looked at the code behind it?
It’s a complete hack. The comments from the programmers themselves admit this.
But this is what you get when someone without computer science fundamentals tries to write a parser. I’m sure they had good intentions, but this doesn’t cut it.
Also, cfeclipse is dead. The cfeclipse developer group (google groups) is a ghost town.
@prg – Of course it’s a hack. Lots of people have worked on it – from the very early days of Eclipse.
But it DOES work and Adobe certainly has done NOTHING to fill that need so we work with what we have.
In regards to who can write a parser – it IS open-source. Feel free to improve upon it…
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