Last night I was thinking about the Bolt announcement and how disappointed I was in the whole thing. For the most part they announced they were building CFEclipse. Yes they announced some ORM and code generation tools but the majority of ‘features’ they announced are available today in CFEclipse.
Maybe I’m spoiled by using open-source and Google “beta” software for so long but I was really expecting something to download and tinker with from Adobe, even if it was alpha quality. They have had years to build this (IMO it should have been in the oven before Flex Builder) and I know they are probably baking in some fancy stuff for CF9 but it still seems like they could release something and work on the advanced features as they go along.
I think my expectations with new software (which leans strongly towards open source) lately is to see something with basic functionality and know it’s going to be improved in the future with frequent updates. When I first installed Ubuntu over two years ago it was functional but hardly bug free. 2 years later it has become very polished but still has the occasional bug and that’s OK. I know it’s very likely that those will be fixed in the next round of updates and features will be added and improved upon.
Maybe my wife is right and I’m just impatient… I’m still looking forward to getting beta access to Bolt and I hope the product is going to be worth the wait!
Looks like your thread of IDE discussions isn’t flowing the way you expected. I am also frustrated by the LOOOONG wait for the next IDE. CFStudio has long been missed. We will see what can be done with this new IDE. (And though CFEclipse is a nice stop gap it has issues. We could state it like this… if Adobe shipped a product with the same issues we would be less gracious than we are for a free open source effort. Not trying to find fault… my point is we expect more than we have now from Adobe and my expectation is they will achieve at least that very well.)
I agree but still a lot of unanswered questions.
Cost vs. issues. As you said – free = tolerance to issues. Will the features of the new IDE justify the cost?
What happens to CF features in Dreamweaver?
And I’m really curious if/how it will support the other CF engines. Will Adobe expose the code generation stuff to be able to support Railo and OpenBD?
Personally I was very excited about the announcement. I have been using CFE for a couple of years now, and in general I am happy. But I would like to see some unity in the CF IDE world.
I heard Ben Forta say once that about 1/3 of the community uses CFE, 1/3 uses Dreamweaver, and the rest fit in the Other category (Homesite/CF Studio, text editor, etc.) I think if new CF developers had a definitive choice from the creators of CF, the language will be stronger in the long run.
That said, I work with a group of developers that all use Dreamweaver. When I sent out an email about Bolt, nobody had anything to say. I think they are not very happy about it (or they don’t care) because they like Dreamweaver. So it will be interesting to see how well this is received by those that aren’t currently using Eclipse. Especially since Eclipse has a learning curve.
Oh I’m excited!!! Just disappointed I can’t play with it RIGHT NOW. :)
It will be interesting to see how they market it vs. Dreamweaver. Will they strip out CF stuff from DW and make it more a design/HTML tool?
I also think unless the price is really competitive they are going to have a tough time marketing it. My company already has invested in DW and lately MyEclipse. Are the new features in Bolt going to enable me to justify buying yet another tool?
I just hope they’ve ironed out the bugs in CFEclipse, and not just selling a code generator addon.
Henry – from what I understand from the various sources – Mark Drew was involved somewhat but it’s not a ‘fixed’ version of CFEclipse. It’s a new tool entirely.
http://www.iterateme.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/11/19/MAX-and-Me-Day-2
- Introspection on components in a project so that when you create an object, you get a the “intellisense” drop-down list of methods in that object, as you would in Flex Builder
- Introspection on queries on the current document, giving you a drop down of columns in each query
It shouldn’t be a cfeclipse clone. CFEclipse doesn’t have intellisense.
I too have been waiting. I cannot express how much I want to get my mitts on Bolt. CF has not had a vendor supported dedicated IDE in like 5-6 years. I have kludged together an Eclipse install with 3-4 plugins and my own home brewed code generators to get by. As much as I love them, HomeSite and CFStudio just don’t cut it any more. Let’s face it, every other web based language, platform, framework etc has a dedicated, enterprise grade IDE EXCEPT for CF. DW is good but it is not an IDE. Not like VS or Aptana, Flex builder, NetBeans or Eclipse for Java (or for that matter Eclipse for PHP or JS and AJAX libraries or Python or ROR etc. etc…). All it takes is a passing experience with any of the above IDE’s to see what CF developers are missing out on.
I am very happy that Adobe is addressing this issue. MS gets it. Like Steve Balmer said: “developers, developers, developers”. It is all about developer mind share.