Adobe really needs to get this right.  Bolt, the soon to be released IDE for ColdFusion, is the talk of the town in the CF community, and let me tell you – it better be good.  I have to say, I’m not really that pleased that this is an Eclipse based product.  I’ve almost completely dropped Eclipse lately due to instability – at least on the Mac.  I think that Adobe could have made this product a stand-alone product on its own platform, and still allowed it to be extensible  (If you have not heard, you will be able to write extensions for Bolt with CFML, which is all kinds of awesome).

I’ve used Eclipse and CFEclipse for a while now, after switching from Dreamweaver several years ago.  I really didn’t dislike Dreamweaver as much as many people did, but found Eclipse to be a little better, especially with the addons that are available.  I’ve also used Coda from Panic software for the past year and a half, and it’s becoming my primary IDE.  It is not as feature rich, but it’s simple, and lightning fast.  It’s also got great FTP/SSH support, and Subversion integration.  As far as its ColdFusion support, it has some limited CF autosuggest.  Not as good an CFEclipse, and I don’t expect it to support CF9 immediately either, but it’s enough to get by on.  Since I’m using ORMs for most of my sites now, I don’t find I’m writing as many built in CF functions anyway.

In a perfect world, Bolt will be as fast as Coda, as feature filled as Dreamweaver, and as extensible as Eclipse.  All of our CF_Fingers are crossed.