Comments on: Are You Sitting On The Fence Waiting For A CF IDE From Adobe?

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:52:46 +0000

@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…

By: prg

prg — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 23:50:07 +0000

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.

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:50:22 +0000

@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…

By: Brien

Brien — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:43:48 +0000

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.

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:54:46 +0000

@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.

By: Vince Collins

Vince Collins — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:44:19 +0000

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.

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:42:54 +0000

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.

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Thu, 15 May 2008 00:09:44 +0000

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By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:13:39 +0000

@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.

By: Jake Munson

Jake Munson — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:55:42 +0000

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.