Ahhh! I started to learn .NET because the company at my day job uses .NET, but now I see this and I am happily playing around in ColdFusion again. 1/2 half of my brain absolutely loves ColdFusion because it is just so cool, and the other half wants to know what everyone around me is using.

I guess it will end up being like operating systems - best to know a few. I do kinda see ColdFusion as the OS X of development languages. Not as many people use it right now but it is awesome to use. Maybe it will be like OS X and if it stays on it's current track with Adobe start to build a sizable user base again. Hope so.

- The random brain dump of a new developer. (sorry) :)

P.S. I do make sure to wear my ColdFusion Lives! T-shirt around the office now and then. Gets a few laughs or groans.

P.S.S. The performance is much faster for CFB3. I don't get "rebuilding workspace" every time I switch back to it from another app. Can't wait to try the built in air functionality.

woot! really glad to see this. switched to CFB full time about 6 weeks ago, and performance --especially on large css files-- has been really weak at times. hope this fixes some of those issues.

@Ben: Personally, I have no problem with excitement. :)

Beta Timeframe
When you install ColdFusion Builder beta 3, the software will remain active through March 2010. Once the commercial version of ColdFusion Builder has shipped, you will need to uninstall the public beta and install the final version.
---

Are CF9 owners going to be licensed a copy, or will we have to buy a license in March?

Warning: I do not speak for Adobe.

As far as I know, licensed CF9 users do NOT get a free copy of CFB.

@steve
that's the one thing that has kept me from even trying out cfbuilder, not knowing anything about what my migrations options will be when the beta period ends. it would be nice to know a roundabout price for the product or who will qualify for a free copy if they are going to be doing that.

personally i think that adobe should just give the thing away. now that we're not crippled by an express edition of cf, this could be the jump cf needs to attract more developers.

Started using CFB at MAX. I have to admit, it's been a little irritating in my experience as beta namely because of coding assist being very flaky in my experience. On any file type.

Downloading the new beta now.. I'm hoping code assist is a little better.

at first impression, this new beta cleans up a lot of the flakiness and lag. haven't had enough time to break anything yet.

So far, what I can tell, code assist in in beta 3 is much more responsive and reliable! FTW!

I stopped using the last beta, was a pain without line numbers and especially posting to server on save. I'll give it another go, thx for the update.

Line numbers always worked - but there was a bug in some builds on turning it on. You had to edit a config file at one point. Either way - it will definitely work for you now.

Ray,
What is recommanded, standalone or eclipse builtin cf builder? I tried beta 1 with eclipse plugin, but it had way too many issues to be used as ide. Plus, i wasnt able to remove cf builder from my system.

I'm going to try beta 3 though.

@Syed: I'm in the minority. While I respect Eclipse, I find it to be flakey at times. Therefore, I always use Standalone. I've got a Standalone CFB and a Standalone Flex Builder. I just prefer it that way.

I ran the beta 2 copies of FlashBuilder and CFB together and found the CFB Eclipse Plugin running inside FlashBuilder to have some bugs (although workable). In fact, at the CF/Flash/AIR training last month, our instructor required that we run FlashBuilder and CFB separately.

Of course, things may be better with beta 3.

@Syed,

There are many factors that one must consider in order to answer your question definitively. If you can share your environment with us, that will help loads. Or better yet, throw your question in the CFBuilder forum. There are a bunch of people eager to help and share ideas in there (present company included).

It is my personal recommendation that any developers lucky enough to be running on the 64-bit goodness found in OS X or Ubuntu (or Vista...I feel sorry for you but it's okay. There's always Windows 8. ;-) that you install CFBuilder as a plugin on a 64-bit version of Eclipse (3.5.1 or higher). The performance is remarkable and with the right jvm settings, this installation screams!

CFBuilder Beta 3 now supports the 3.5.1 version of Eclipse, however, I am not sure yet whether Adobe will be shipping a 64-bit version of Standalone. There are a couple of threads out on this topic and I opened up a thread in the CFBuilder forums to find this out myself. If anyone knows, please share your comments in those threads.

Matt

Ray,
That might be so. I'll surely try standalone beta 3.

Matthew,
BTW, my computer environment is: win7 (ofcourse 64bit), JVM V 6 Update 17 (I always have my jvm updated), and eclipse 3.5. I've have pretty much everything up to date. Plus, there is no performance issue here with any other application because i've like 8gb memory and soforth.

@Syed,

You are definitely in a beautiful position then. All you have to do then is download a 64-bit version of Eclipse 3.5+ for Windows and then install CFBuilder as a plugin pointing to the directory where your 64-bit Eclipse installation is located. If performance is not sufficient with default eclipse.ini jvm settings, you can really geek out and tweak them to your hearts content. Just make sure you know what you are doing before touching them. ;-)

My $0.02 worth

Will adobe be releasing a update URL for CFBuilder Beta 2 to CFBuilder Beta 3; automatically installing these updates?

P.S. I love the CFBuilder even the beta 1 moved beyond CFEclipse and DW as the top tool in my kit, whenever they are ready for release they have a guaranteed customer.

Matt,
Do they have eclipse 64bit for windows os? I thought it was only for linux/unix. Also, do you have it setup as a plugin?

I wonder if we can keep eclipse and cfbuilder (standalone) on the same machine. That would be neater. I might try this on my vmware.

@Syed,

At first glance of the eclipse.org download site it is not apparent but a 64-bit version of Eclipse does indeed exist. There are some prerequisites as you will learn (mainly, you must be running a 64-bit JVM) but it is not too difficult from what I gather. With that said, please take a look at this link as I found the instruction straightforward and accurate:

http://lingpipe-blog.com/20...

If you need any further assistance, please post your question in the Adobe CFBuilder forum section and I, and many others, will be more than happy to help you out (Though it is on my to-do list for 2010, I do not have a blog or anything of the sort at this time so this is the best I can offer right now :-). I have Windows 7 64-bit running as a Boot Camp partition on top of my MacBook Pro so I am able to use VMWare Fusion to do it myself in order to help you out.

Oh, and ask Santa for a Mac for Christmas. Your life will be much easier and you'll have more free time on your hands to do other things, like test Adobe Beta software, lol. ;-)

>>personally i think that adobe should just give the thing away. now that we're not crippled by an express edition of cf, this could be the jump cf needs to attract more developers.

It will certainly be a cruel joke if they want to charge a fortune for cf and this.

Have they really not said anything yet???

Holy good god, I just noticed: a 302 MB download for an editor?

Have you never downloaded Eclipse before?

Trying it now. Homesite+ is open, using 22mb memory and cfbuilder is using a whopping 238mb! Eclipse is such a ginormous pig.

>>Displays a drop-down list of all built-in and user-defined functions.

Anyone know how to bring this up outside of tags? Doesn't seem to work in cfscript or anywhere except tags. Surely I can pop up the functions menu somehow to speed up entry?

I will have to try CFB as an Eclipse Plugin, currently it just uses up more system memory than Eclipse w/ CFEclipse and Aptana for me. Of course, its all beta, so can't wait to see the final version.

@Ziggy: Cost: Nope, I've not heard much, but I'd be willing to bet something near the cost of Flex Builder. Maybe 200 bucks. To me, this is more than reasonable for a tool I'll use 7 days a week.

After checking both, I'm going to try the e text editor (textmate for windows) w cftextmate and framework bundles for now. Obviously it doesn't do everything Builder does but I never use all the extras and won't get a huge bill later.

Only 26mb of memory use currently, some neat functionality, and nice css/js/xml/whatever support.

(Unfortunately you need a huge cygwin extra download to get mac textmate compatibility for bundles, oh well.)

Anyway, another good option out there for people who don't need the extras and want something nimbler. I've been looking to move off homsite+ for ages.

Ziggy, I don't think those other editors can manage step debugging, can they? That's probably one of the extremely useful "extras" that you'll love.

I agree with Joshua. Are there any developers in here that remember the good old days of the ColdFusion Studio IDE? I know I do. Once the MX line hit the streets, the IDE never caught up. As a result, I gravitated towards HomeSite+ in 2001. It wasn't until the CFEclipse plugin was written that, given all of the "Eclipse IDE" hype back in 2006 and the fact that it was a huge hit in the Java world and I really liked the idea of the "plugin" concept, I decided to try out Eclipse. I could not have been happier and I have not looked back since. As soon as Adobe added Step Debugging to their Eclipse plugin feature set, I knew my life as a ColdFusion developer would never be the same. Now that they have finally decided to bring back a true ColdFusion IDE for true ColdFusion developers, it will be like Christmas in Q2 or Q3 2010! Thank you to Adobe and all of the folks that have persuaded Adobe to make this product a reality.

Resource hog or not, I welcome the ColdFusion Builder IDE. I will happily pay the $100 or $200 because it truly allows me to live up to the RAD concept of ColdFusion application development. It just makes my job easier and over time, if you give it the chance it deserves, I am confident you will, too.

If you have a minute, check out this link where it shows Macromedia ColdFusion 5 Studio being sold for $100 for Windows only and all of the features it had that we once had.

http://www.webhostingedge.c...

Maybe ColdFusion Builder is geared more towards old timer ColdFusion developers. But I am 26 and if that makes me an old timer, it would be an honor to be a part of that demographic. The one thing that can't be taken away from the ColdFusion community is that we are always willing to help out anyone that is interested in learning ColdFusion and what it takes to become a ColdFusion developer. If you want to use Notepad, Notepad+, TextMate, et cetera, more power to you. We're always here to help you when you need it.

:-)

If only Eclipse could support DW style snippets with key bindings and surroundings.

Being able to bind <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_integer" value="#...#"> To a key (CTRL+ALT+i for me), and then having the cursor sit between the two pound characters waiting for text, is insanely useful for me. I can actually type "contact.first_name", highlight it, press my shortcut and get <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_integer" value="#contact.first_name#">.

The best solution thus far for eplipse in general has been using "autohotkey" with the trigger text (http://domoconnor.com/2009/... but that just seems sloppy and doesn't handle the "surround this selection" method of snippets.

I'd buy CFB in a heartbeat if I could transition my snippet workflow over to it by using proper key bindings.

-Brian

@Brian,

Have you submitted a Feature Request? It's definitely got my vote.

Hey Matthew, I did did. Thanks for the suggestion.

-Brian

Does anyone know if there is away to tell Cfbuilder to ignore certain syntax errors?
I have a .cfm page that looses all of it's color coding on the line where it thinks a syntax error is occurring, but for our application it is not. we use mnemonics in cf templates that get replaced by an application builder that writes out (publishes) the file to the client directory with the mennomic (~~) replaced by read settings.
one example is like so

<cfif chkEmail.PVTID EQ ~~002>
<cfset priorVenue="here">
etc..

cfbuilder (not sure about cfeclipse) does not like the "~~"
and every line of code after the ~~ appears in black- no color coding.
i have unchecked "enable syntax checking" under Syntax checking in preferences , but that did not help.

i have this same question in the cfbuilder blog, but noone has responded.

@Brian what i do is to create regexp to wrap "match" with custom content. For example, if you need to wrap values in update statement:
=(.*?),
--->
=<cfqueryparam value="$1" cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar">,

Still creating a snippet that can wrap up selction would be awesome.