Andy Jarrett wrote on 02/16/10 7:50 PM

Hi Todd, I really don't see the issues you are seeing with CFB. One thing I will say with Eclipse in general is that for stable performance don't have loads of projects open. If you don't use them regularly Right-Click>Close Project

Chris Tierney wrote on 02/16/10 8:08 PM

You're in the same boat as me. I've used Dreamweaver the same way for years and have recently tried moving to CFBuilder. Two reasons I'm trying to move: 1. That's supposed to be the new offical CF IDE. 2. It's supposed to have better code insight. Well, I've yet to see either. I know it's still in Beta, but they're close to what they consider a final product. I loose a lot of productivity in CFBuilder of Dreamweaver. I'm constantly trying to tweak CFBuilder to way Dreamweaver does out of the box. And I'm a hardcore CF programmer.

Todd Rafferty wrote on 02/16/10 8:19 PM

@Andy: I'm on Windows XP at work, very unstable for some reason. When I'm on Windows 7 at home, it's fine. You're on a mac, so... I don't think we can quite compare apples to oranges.

Gert Franz wrote on 02/17/10 1:55 AM

That's why I am glad I stayed with CFStudio :-)
I use it since 10 years and I am still satisfied. CFEclipse of course is my choice when I do programming on larger projects.

Gert

Andreas Schuldhaus wrote on 02/17/10 2:40 AM

I did the HomeSite/CFStudio - CFEclipse - CFBuilder (standalone) Path. Didn't experience major CFB (B2) stability issues on Vista so far, besides an annoying startup delay. Still missing CFEclipse's Method View, though. Closing projects in Eclipse is always highly recommended to speed up the IDE.

Todd Rafferty wrote on 02/17/10 6:40 AM

@Andreas: As noted above, my instability was on WinXP at work. At home, with Win 7, I'm fine - however, I also have a beefier machine at home too.

Peter Boughton wrote on 02/17/10 7:03 AM

Hi Todd and Andreas,

The CFE team is working on solving the methods view and related problems, and we'll shortly be ramping efforts up in this area.

Also, I think we will actually be sharing dictionary files with CFBuilder (possibly this was included in latest release, I'm not sure).

There's a lot of good stuff going on at the moment with CFE, but if you do have any specific features you want to request added to CFEclipse please do pop over to the mailing list and let us know:
http://groups.google.com/group/cfeclipse-users

Thanks. :)

Jim Priest wrote on 02/17/10 8:50 AM

Peter beat me - but yes - if there are features you are looking for in CFEclipse - please let us know.

While we can't promise anything :) we are certainly trying to listen to, and act upon, any feedback we get.

Jose wrote on 02/17/10 10:28 AM

I have CFE, CFB, and DW CS4, and I find CS4 to be the best of all three. It's more stable and richer than CFE and CFB (albeit pricier).

Ben Nadel wrote on 02/17/10 11:10 AM

I primarily use HomeSite; but, when CFBuilder actually comes out as a full product, I'll give it a more thorough try. Right now, I've played around with editing and creating extensions, which are very cool. But until the release, I'll stick with HomeSite.

denstar wrote on 02/17/10 9:36 PM

The cool thing about CFEclipse is that it's there to be improved by anyone who wants to do so.

Much like Railo and Open BlueDragon are. ;)

I know that doesn't mean much if you can't currently "do" Eclipse plugin development, but the implications are *awesome* when you stop to think about it (and note, I couldn't "do" it either, originally, but I wanted things to be "my" way so bad I learned how-- working from simple things to harder things).

You can have it your way.

How you do so is up to you (learning how yourself, paying someone to do it for you, waiting for someone else to want it bad enough, etc.), but this is plain impossible with closed source software.

Which brings us to the relationship between CFBuilder and CFEclipse: There are to terms to come to. :)

CFB represents Adobe, and CFE just plain represents. Woot-woot! Heh.

There isn't any bad blood or anything, nor are they competing, as they be flip sides of the same coin. Different targets and concerns, but united in wanting all the bases covered, for CFML as a whole.

As Peter mentioned, CFB and CFE have managed to share language files, and those language files are now in a Git repository that makes it even easier for people to submit corrections or additions. (Not that many people historically have, even tho it's just a bit of XML-- no Java skills required.)

The open source software revolution hit CFML a little later than other languages, but we're catching up pretty quick.


The Eclipse workflow is pretty foreign to a lot of people at first (especially DW CFers), but it's a decent one once you're used to it. And the amount of plugins is just freakish-- I don't know if there's another IDE even close.

I'm very fond of Mylyn as well. (Whole-E crap! Talk about a production boost!)

Eclipse has a lot going for it.

Anyways, hopefully the future will bring even more collaboration between CFB and CFE-- but know that there is /some/ going on right now. Woohoo!
OBD will soon be in the mix too if we can figure out how to collaborate without messing up license-wise.

I just wanted to clarify that I, as a contributor to CFEclipse, am not aware of any kind of friction between CFE and CFB. If that's the perception that's out there, it's not correct, as far as I know.

Ultimately I think we all want to see CFML just freaking continue to kick ass and chew bubble gum-- oh, look at that, all outta gum.

Todd Rafferty wrote on 02/18/10 11:21 AM

@Den / Jim / Peter: I don't think that the CFEclipse team will find my feedback any different than anyone that is considering CFBuilder over CFEclipse.

I'm not going to lie, having intellisense (or whatever it is) available as I was typing was damn nice. The extension builder, while I didn't dig 100% into it, is useful.

Neither project have the tag / function completion as smooth and stable as what Dreamweaver has now out of the box. Case in point, I don't know what I'm doing that triggers this:

http://external.web-rat.com/misc/argh.png

If I hit anything, space / enter or whatever, I'm going to get the first function listed in that block whether I want it or not. Now, I'm not up on the latest cfeclipse yet, I'm downloading that as we speak and perhaps maybe it's been fixed.

denstar wrote on 02/18/10 1:47 PM

Ja, the latest release fixes that specific problem (after a >), but the proposals are getting re-factored in general, as they're still not even close to as good as they can be.

I too used to be a Dreamweaver-ist. It's a lovely editor.

It can't hold a candle to the potential that is an Eclipse-based editor tho. I don't know if you've done any Java development using Eclipse, but if you have, you know how, well, /really really nice/ it is to code in.
It writes 90% of the code for you. And it's more configurable than you can shake a stick at. Navigating your source is a snap, re-factoring is slick as snot...

We'll get all that in CFE, eventually. I'm not a stranger to the JTD and WST sources and whatnot, but I'm not a super-dude-er, and this is a spare time gig.

Mainly what I'm getting at tho is Eclipse offers a TON of useful stuff when you get to the level of needing it.

Ant build script editor/target runner, constantly improving Data Tools, constantly improving Web Tools, Hibernate GUI entity editing, SVN, Git, CSV, Mercurial, blah, blah, blah.

And Mylyn... Mylyn my love. *smooch* Yes, it's good enough to kiss. Mylyn alone is a reasonable reason to use Eclipse.

Heh.

Anyways, remember what I said about CFML embracing Open Source? Collaboration is going to be a lot more important that it was before. It already is for a lot of projects.

There's a lot to think about, as far as productivity goes, but if you've got a process that works for you, more power to you, ja know?
I'm just echoing the sentiment that you'll see quite a bit out there -- "At first, Eclipse slowed me down. Now I couldn't imagine coding without it!".
It's possible that the time you loose by not having a smooth X is outweighed by the time you save using tool Y, which Eclipse provides at no charge.

Something about being able to make my CFML editor do whatever I want it to just gets my nipples hard, as they say, also. Man I love that, even when I don't have the knowledge to do it myself.

Anyways, I'm super biased, as I'm a big open source supporter, so, take all this with that in mind.

Ultimately the fact that one is dev'n'n CFML is enough for me, whether one does it in DW, Eclipse, or Notepad :)