My Thoughts on ColdFusion Builder Beta 1

As many know, I've used Dreamweaver to develop my ColdFusion application for many years now and have very few complaints. I have always felt it's the most efficient IDE for me.

But over the past few months or so I have trialed ColdFusion Builder (Bolt) in the Alpha and Beta releases. I would try an Alpha release, submit a bug, stop using it, and try again with the next release. That's expected in Alpha releases.

But lately I've been using the Beta installed via the standalone method. I can see some advantages in the future to using this IDE. For example the variable insight is usefull. If I declared an application variable in my Application.cfc, it will pick it up while coding.

I've been using the Beta for at least a week now. But the bugs still linger. I've had to go back to Dreamweaver for one project and will go back to it all together for now.

Here's why:

• The IDE constantly hangs, making my frusteration go up and my productivity go down.
• On one project, it constantly tries to build the workspace - hanging the program.
• On the other project, it appears it lags when looking up tags and/or variables - hanging the program.
• The double quote auto-insert is annoying and I stopped trying to figure out how to turn it off.
• The tag suggest, variable suggest, and tag insight features are hard to tell what is selected as the suggestion and I don't want to go search for different color options.
• The color coding is much poorer contrast than Dreamweaver, making it harder to scan the code.
• Word Wrap? Come on - why hide it?
• I really like the Dreamweaver tag autoclose when you type "</", and hate the tag auto close when you first type the tag.
• I'd like to see a <br /> tag appear when I press shift-Enter
• I understand I can change a lot of this in the preferences - but using Dreamweaver - it's all defaults - and I love it.

I hope this IDE comes a long ways, because as of now - I have no intention of buying it unless there's some major improvement. Many people like to use Eclipse for web development. But I've just found it to be a real pain. For example - what if you don't want a feature anymore? What happened to Uninstall? Arrg!

Well - there's just my thoughts.