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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jsLex gives developers a complete picture of the performance issues with-in thier Ajax application. By auto injecting profiling code using jsLex ant task, developers don’t need to modify their code to track down bottlenecks, minimizing coding erros and saving time.

Looks like it does quite a bit more than that look at the features page.

I’ve been so busy but I need to find some time to tinker with these tools.  I still have tried out  CubicTest either! And today I noticed Bromine!

Bromine is a fully fledged QA tool that integrates with Selenium Core and Selenium Remote Control. It makes the life of testers, test managers, developers and other people who would have an interest in how the development of a web application is progressing.

Too many tools and not enough time!!

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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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393 Results (4/9 - 4/28)

1. Which of these describes your role best as a CFML user?
- Application Developer (172)
- Web Developer (129)
- Application Architect (60)
- Other included “superdude” and “all around scrub”

2. Which IDE(s) do you currently use for CFML development?
- CFEclipse (319)
- Dreamweaver (133)
- Eclipse (118)
- Homesite/CFStudio (91)
- Flexbuilder (82)
- Other - Aptana, Notepad++

3. What is your platform of choice for development?
- Windows (320)
- Mac (101)
- Linux (57)

4. Which features in your IDE do you most commonly/frequently use during development?
- Syntax highlighting of code (351)
- File Explorer (237)
- Help for CFTags/Functions (220)
- HTML editing (217)
- Source code control (205)
- CSS editing (160)
- Javascript editing (94)

5. How important are the following features for you in a CFML IDE?
Must Have:
- Syntax high-lighting of code (288)
- HTML editing (237)
- CSS editing (210)
- Javascript editing (199)
- Help for CFTags/Functions (193)
- Source code control (185)

Very Important:
- Integrated debugger (124)
- Framework Support (121)
- Intelisense on CFCs (114)

Useful:
- Integrated CFC explorer (161)
- Integrated log viewer (146)
- Integrated CRUD wizard (126)

Nice To Have:
- Integrated RDS data explorer (104)
- Customizable code coloring (83)
- Simplified Flex/Air development (71)

Unnecessary:
- Integrated CRUD wizard (71)
- Integrated RDS data explorer (50)
- Simplified Flex/Air development (31)

6. What in your opinion would be the right price range for CFML IDE?
- Under $100 (138)
- $100-500 (124)
- Free (109)

7. What features would you like to see added as one click install to an CFML IDE?
- Source control (294)
- XML tools (240)
- Documentation generation tools (220)
- Diff / compare tools (216)
- Unit testing tools (203)
- Other: “The ability to harness the magical powers of the internet.”

Still disappointed in the low number of results.  According to this recent article in Infoworld…

Adobe officials cited analyst estimates of 400,000 developers using ColdFusion

So 400 results seems a tad low.  So either people just ignored the survey, or there is a huge number of ColdFusion developers that don’t know about my blog :)  I’d love to know what kind of results Adobe got on their IDE survey.

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Savvy CM installation is very easy. There are no installation programs to be run on the server, instead you copy your files to the web server, modify the includes.cfm file with the correct information for your installation, register the database in ColdFusion, then upload your templates.

There are a few things you need to consider. Savvy includes an application.cfm file so if you are installing Savvy into an existing application (which is possible) you need to take some additional steps in order to allow the use of the Savvy application.cfm. Again these are outlined in details in the online docs.

Next you modify a file, includes.cfm, in which you define you datasource, some path information, site name and description and some other general settings.  Next you run a diagnostic utility which will check your configuration, verify your datasources and warn you if you need to fix anything. If all looks well you can then use the same diagnostic page to create your database.

The few glitches I encountered during installation and configuration were all covered in the documentation.

Once you have Savvy installed and configured the next step is to create a template!

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But you may not know that…

So I thought I’d share a few ways you can stay current:

1. Join the CFEclipse mailing list (there are other lists available for developers, etc)
2. Subscribe to the Trac RSS feed you can see what bugs are closed, open, wiki edits and more
3. Subscribe to Mark Drew’s blog

Of course hopefully you are subscribed to my blog so I won’t mention that

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Results are available in both PDF and Excel:

• PDF: cfml-ide-report-041708
• Excel: cfml-ide-report-041708

Both these are just a dump of the data - no pretty graphs. I’m going to try and go through some of this data and summarize it a bit in a more readable format (hopefully I can get to this over the weekend)

I did dump the HTML output (with pretty graphs) into a PDF as well.

• PDF (with graphs): cfml-ide-report-041708a

This is a bit nicer to look at but you can’t drill down into the ‘other’ replies, etc.

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Check out Marc’s post and please consider joining the CFEclipse mailing list and contribute your thoughts.

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So the CFML IDE Survey has been up for a few days… some quick numbers:

• The post on my blog had about 200 hits
• Survey admin says: Total Number of Survey Results ~ 300

Hopefully there are more than 300 ColdFusion developers out there…

If you haven’t taken it yet - please consider taking a few moments to take the survey!

I’ll wait a few more days and then post some preliminary results…

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I’ve copied the original questions from the Adobe survey and added a few John Farrar sent me after some discussions on this open Aptana support ticket.

Once we collect some data I’ll publish the results on a regular basis (Ray’s app supports PDF, Excel and HTML export!). If we need more data we can do another survey….

The idea here is to collect some feedback on what you (the CFML community) want to see in an IDE. This data will be available to anyone who wants to help support CFEclipse or roll your own IDE.

So spread the word: Link to survey!

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