I was reading Glyn Jackson’s insightful review of ColdFusion Builder and it got me thinking.

It’s been years since I’ve worked in a shop where we used FTP to deploy files.  I always felt that manual FTP was the worst possible way to move files around (this was before I discovered Ant).  I ended up moving files around with SVN (which I still do today but Ant is the middle man).

I also never used Dreamweaver. I went straight from Homesite to CFEclipse.

Glyn’s post got me thinking however.  Does Dreamweaver’s ’site’ feature force you into FTP?  Do people open Dreamweaver, assume the ’site’ feature is the only option and follow that path?

I’m seeing a lot of the same conversations resurrected with the release of ColdFusion Builder as I did when CFEclipse first appeared.  People struggling with Eclipse’s “project” concept. And the fact that FTP may not be the only option.

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!

CF IDE Announced

So I go to a meeting and of course all the cool stuff is announced…

CF IDE! Bolt!

The good:

• Object Relational Mapping auto-configuration
• Application Code Generation
• Server management

These other features are already in CFEclipse or available via a plugin:

• Easily extensible through the Eclipse framework
• CFML, HTML, Javascript, and CSS Syntax Highlighting
• Code assist for tags, functions, variables, and components
• Code folding
• Snippet creation and management
• Outline viewing
• RDS Explorer for files and databases
• Line-level Debugging

The bad:

• Not released until next year (coincide with the CF9 release?)
• No price info
• No info on platforms supported. I really hope they can bake in 100% Linux support!!

They have a beta signup here: http://www.adobe.com/go/bolt which unfortunately only allows you to select one OS for your development platform?  Hello? I develop on PC at work and Linux at home…

Adobe Labs page here: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Bolt

So we’ll have to wait and see …  (and I hope the photo above in no way influences my beta application…)