I am liking CFBuilder (CFB) more and more as I get used to it. I have been using CFEclipse for a few years now, so I was already pretty happy with CFB. But I keep finding new things that improve my approval.

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I just got wind of a new CFEclipse release, via the CFEclipse mailing list. It's been a while since we've seen a new release, so this is very exciting news! :) They fixed a boat load of bugs, and added some new features. Here are the highlights that were posted to the mailing list by Randy:

• An updated CF8 Dictionary
• Some mild updates to the parser
• Mark occurrences of selected words (tag/variable/method/etc)
• Integration with Eclipse's DocShare (optional)
• Preference for modifying the browse url on unit tests to run unit tests

Also, they have tested this new release with Eclipse 3.4, as well as 3.5 which was also just released today!

So fire up your Eclipse Updater and give this new release a spin. :)

So I was perusing the list of new features in Dreamweaver CS4, and I don't see ANY improvements for ColdFusion coding. There are a couple of new features that will be nice for CF developers, but they aren't directly related to CF (unless I missed something).

Personally I use CFEclipse. But I have been telling my co-workers and friends that I am convinced that Adobe is going to release an Eclipsed based ColdFusion IDE with CF 9 for four reasons:

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I saw a news report yesterday talking about Google Trends, and how you can see what countries and cities search for particular terms the most. I thought it would be fun to find out what countries/cities rank highest for some ColdFusion related terms:

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Have you ever wished you could save a set of open files as a task, close these files to work on a different project, and then easily return to your earlier task? I recently learned about an Eclipse plugin called Mylyn from temega, Mike Rankin, and Dinner on the CFEclipse mailing list. Mylyn was folded into the larger Eclipse project as of Eclipse 3.3. This plugin fills a lot of needs I've been wishing for in Eclipse for a long time. This quote from the project lead sums it up nicely: "We've heard users claim that the Mylyn tool increases their efficiency to the point where they feel like they are coding at the speed of thought. Reducing the UI friction that thwarts our productivity is what the Mylyn project is all about." - Mik Kersten. Here's a short feature list that I stole from this InfoQ article about the latest Mylyn release:

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When I loaded the ColdFusion 8 docs into CFQuickDocs, I used the docs from the Dreamweaver ColdFusion 8 update which was on Adobe's Labs site (ColdFusion 8 was still beta at the time). This worked really well, because all of the tags/functions were in separate .htm files. However, now that CF 8 has been released, I need to update my CFQD docs to the final release docs of CF 8. So I went and downloaded the final Dreamweaver update from the CF downloads site, but I found that Adobe changed the docs for the final release. "Changed" isn't the right word, "stupefied" would be more accurate.

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There are lots of new/changed things in Eclipse 3.3, but I'm only going to highlight the things that are cool to me. Here is the full list of improvements.

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A lot of CFEclipse users use the File Explorer View to work with all their files. I, on the other hand, prefer to use Eclipse's projects. I like them because they allow you to encapsulate things into organized "packages". You can create projects that point to locations all over your file system (or even network locations), and then you will always have easy access to them.

Also, Eclipse offers a simple history for files you've worked on, which allows you to go back to previous versions. So if you're like me, you work with files in a local work space outside of your source code management system, and only upload "final" versions of files. Eclipse makes this scenario even nicer, because you get a built-in history for the local files you work on. If you delete a file, or make a massive amount of changes, you can always go back to previous versions.

Today I learned something new about Eclipse. One thing that has always annoyed me about working with projects is that often times you need to access files that live outside of your defined Project root. You can always do File->Open and find the file, or use the File Explorer. But what if you need to access that file a lot, like if it's an Application.cfc file, or an xml config file? Eclipse allows you to create Linked Resources, which are a way to "bring in" external files and folders to your project.

To do this, right click on your project in the Navigator, and click on New. If you select either Folder or File, and then click Advanced, you are given the option to create a link to an external location. The Eclipse docs say that this is a hard link, so if you edit that file in one project, it will also be changed in any other projects that reference it (a good thing, imo).

Thanks to some help from Daniel Lancelot in this thread, I have finally learned how to add/remove toolbars to Eclipse. I have looked for this before, as I've been using CFEclipse for a couple of years now, but I'd always glossed over the feature because I didn't recognize it for what it is.

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Ok, that's not always true, but at the moment it is. I have had a lot of fun times on cftalk, learned a lot, and I still find it to be a valuable resource. But I don't like how extremely busy it is. I have had a few discussions with Michael Dinowitz about it, and we just disagree about how the list should be managed. But he is the boss, so he can run it however he wants.

What I would like to find is a mailing list that is as popular like cftalk (or at least nearly so), but doesn't have topics like these: "Importing Access data to MySQL" "Windows 2000 virus problems" "CSS positioning help" "Stored procedures in Oracle" See, I think that Michael is Ok with allowing just about any technical topic on cftalk. To be fair, there is moderation, but usually only when flame wars break out, or when non-technical topics crop up. And again, it is his list, so he is free to have whatever rules he wants.

I would love to find a popular ColdFusion mailing list that discusses just that: ColdFusion. If anybody knows of such an animal, let me know. I am already a member of the BlueDragon interest mailing list, cfeclipse users, and a couple of local lists. But these are either too specific (I wouldn't want to ask a general ColdFusion question), or they don't have enough experts to help in those "edge case" scenarios. And no, I don't like forums. I know there are a few of those around that are pretty good, but I prefer mailing lists.