I've recently converted to using
CFEclipse (whose website is
down at the time of posting). I downloaded it sometime in September or October 2005
to use on my new laptop since I didn't have a license for Dreamweaver.
At the time, I only had 256 MB RAM in the laptop (now its 2 GB), so I quickly threw it away (CFEclipse,
not the laptop) and started using Notepad for when I
had to edit CF files, and generally
shied away from doing any Coldfusion development on that machine.
Since that time, on my other home computer and the one at work, I've been using
Eclipse for Java development (and more recently, the Ruby
and RADRails plugins for Ruby and Rails development). So in the last couple of weeks I'd say,
Dreamweaver has started to annoy me.
I was still using the first Dreamweaver MX version, so that might be the problem, but when doing anything
with the file system it started to hang on me. And, since I had been using Eclipse more consistently
for other languages, it was even worse because I had a constant reminder of how crappy Dreamweaver was.
To be fair, I don't know if they've made the newer versions any better, but I'm not planning to try it unless someone tells
me I just
have to try it out.
In any case, because I was so sick of it, I got CFEclipse up and running. And is it ever awesome.
The first thing I love about it is the Methods View, among other things listed at
ColdFusion Developer's Journal. But
that's not all! I've discovered two (probably unintended) "features" it offers:
- When working on large files (I first noticed it on about one about 40 kilobytes), it gets slooooooow. Slow like "you could type 4 or 5 lines of code before it gets done with the first line" slow.
- When working on even larger CFCs, the Methods View stops showing the methods and appears as it does in a .CFM file
So why is this good? Because if you are ever working on CFCs that large, your components quite likely
have more than one responsibility. The annoyance is enough for you to hunt down the extras, pull them
out, and make new components out of them. Design by Annoyance - whatever works, right?
And if you're thinking that its machine related, I'm on a 2.8 GHz CPU with 1 GB of RAM. Not bleeding edge,
but certainly adequate.
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