Open-source Killing Commercial Tools (IDE)
June 10, 2008 by Jim · 4 Comments
Saw this interesting article on Slashdot – Open Source Killing Commercial Developer Tools. Will Adobe ever release an updated IDE for ColdFusion? And if they do – would anyone buy it?
The tools market is dead. Open source killed it. The only commercial tools that can survive today are the ones that leapfrog open source tools.
According to my IDE survey the majority of the 400 respondents indicated they would pay up to $500.
- 111 – Free
- 144 – $100
- 126 – $100-500
But one wonders how much better it would have to be before people switched from the free CFEclipse. And as I’ve said before – now with 4 CFML engines available – a ‘universal’ CFML IDE become even more important.
The Slashdot article leads to a post at DZone where the author discusses his new IDE which looks interesting as well.
UNA Collaborative Edition is a real-time collaborative development environment for software engineers. It lets two or more developers edit the same code, at the same time. It’s similar to pair programming, but better because both developers can contribute productively, whether they’re located across the hall from each other or on different continents.
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The Open-source Killing Commercial Tools (IDE) by Jim, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
If you look at the Java market (admittedly much larger than our CFML community) there are 3 viable projects doing well. Of those projects there are 2 free solutions and one commercial. The commercial offering has done very well and gaining market share. As much as I am a cfEclipse advocate it really would not take too much to get me to pay 300 or so bucks for an IDE. Not to imply the few features I want would be easy, else I would put them in cfEclipse, but the feature count is small. Refactoring help, CFC intellisense and built in file deployment features are top of my list. The last one I accomplish right now with ANT but a robust built in solution would be a very nice feature (I am looking into using WTP’s server plugins to accomplish this right now).
“The tools market is dead.” Heh…typical SlashDot silliness. Personally I don’t pay for dev tools, so for me the “tools market” is indeed dead. But let’s not forget about Visual Studio. And off the top of my head I can name a few more, Code Gear (formerly Borland), Active state’s IDEs (popular in the Perl crowd), and of course Adobe has a few very popular tools that they sell.
As far as ColdFusion, I’d love to see Adobe release an improved IDE. I like CFEclipse, but let’s face it, it’s pretty buggy. Mark Drew has done some excellent work, and he has received some help from others, but frankly the project seems stagnant. There are still some pretty serious bugs in the Editor that can cause you to lose work.
Perhaps the commercial suite is dead, but there is a very thriving add on market. For instance with Eclipse there are several commercially available variation, Aptana and Genuitec’s MyEclipse come to mind. The real point with these ide tools is that they provide a genuine added value. If you look at what you get with MyEclipse vs. Eclipse or other tools, then the $30 to $60 subscription fee is worth it.
Larry – I agree. Maybe the ideal would be to have something like CFEclipse as a base platform – and then each of the CFML vendors could provide plugins for their special features – either as open-source solutions or commercial products?