Lately with all the news about open source CFML I’ve been wondering where CFEclipse fits in? We all know Bolt is on the horizon but being an Adobe product I simply don’t see it supporting the other CFML engines.
While CFEclipse certainly isn’t going anywhere – I do wonder about it’s future. Mark Drew has moved on to Railo (a good thing!). While Mark has stated CFEclipse is not dead, I do wonder how much time he will realistically be able to commit to the project.
So What’s The Big Deal?
I use CFEclipse everyday and it does work, but much like a car, without regular maintenance things begin to fall apart. Today there are over 200 open tickets in the CFEclipse bug tracker. The Adobe ColdFusion Extensions are broken. And I wonder if interest is waning because Bolt is coming?
The Future
I’ve always thought that CFEclipse should be an open “CFML” editor and given the Eclipse plugin architecture it seems like CFEclipse could be built to support the CFML Advisory Board’s ‘core’ CFML language by default and other vendors could supply plugins (free or commercial) that would provide language support for their products. Grand ideas for sure…
The Solution?
I’m not sure what the solution is? People on the mailing list have openly stated they would be willing to pay to have features added to CFEclipse. But who to pay is the question? While we have an abundance of users - people with the time, skills and knowledge to work under the hood have been hard to find.
It may be too early for this but I have wondered if the new CFML kids on the block (OpenBD and Railo) would have spare resources available to help support CFEclipse?
For years the biggest complaint about ColdFusion was the lack of a good IDE. CFEclipse has filled that gap, and with the alternatives (Bolt, Homesite and Dreamweaver) being Adobe products - the CFML community will have much to gain by keeping CFEclipse healthy and open.
Possibly Related:
The Where Does CFEclipse Fit In An Open CFML World? by Jim, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
I, like you, use it every day. And I am concerned about it’s future. I am willing to bet money that when Bolt is released it will cost around $300 (standard for IDEs these days). So I might be able to use that at work (they’ll pay for it) but at home it’s out of the question. So CFE is my only hope. Too bad I don’t know Java (and I have very little desire to learn it)…
I have to say that @ $300 I will almost definitely buy bolt for myself. I’m self-employed, so its a biz expense anyway.
This assumes however that its going to have some sort of worthwhile features above and beyond what cfeclipse already provides, but I am expecting it will
Jeff, I’m not too worried about the cost. I’d just hate to have 3 editors installed in order to handle code for CF, OpenBD and Railo.
As far as language support goes I think CFEclipse can’t really go backwards from where it is now. CFEclipse already supports user defined tag dictionaries, so if a particular engine needs support for certain bespoke tags then either the vendors or we as users can add support where it is needed.
Other bug fixes may be a slightly different story (Java isn’t quite as simple as editing an XML file), but considering the tools we were using 4+ years ago I think we currently have it pretty good, and all off the back of some community members who gave CFEclipse to us for free. And it would be a shame for Adobe’s Bolt IDE to block support for the customisation of the tags / syntax available in other CFML engines when CFML developers would gladly pay for it if/when it turns out to be a superior IDE (for those who can afford it).
So what could Bolt possibly have that CFEclipse does not? Spry widget wizards – that’s not worth 300 bucks? I’ll bet that Bolt’s big advantage initially will be out of the box support for working CF9’s new features. Remember when you used to get a copy of ColdFusion Studio when you bought ColdFusion Server?
I have attempted to switch from DW to CFEclipse multiple times and have come to the conclusion that it is just too buggy and cumbersome. There are many who obviously swear by it since everyone still hates Dreamweaver for whatever reason, but I just spent hours trying to get updates to install without throwing errors and getting my line numbers to show up (which ultimately required a trip to a configuration file). Opened the file explorer view and oops…no files, just more errors. These are just a few of the many frustrations and broken features I have encountered and the value of the time I have lost trying to get CFEclipse up and running more than justifies the price of a more reliable commercial IDE.