Bolt Action?
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.
Based on eclipse? Augh.
Like you, I use Coda primarily. I was hoping Bolt to be a decent OS-native app, to take advantage of the OS it’s on. Well, I guess if it has it’s own FTP module (that works) it wont be so bad.
I agree. Not very happy with the eclipse based product. Due to eclipse issues I do most of my coding in Dreamweaver anyway.
I agree that Adobe better get it right. They need to get any software release ‘right’.
Personally, I am a big fan of CFEclipse. its the best IDE for CF since Studio for me.
I’m also a huge fan of CFEclipse. The CF Community owes a huge amount to Mark Drew for his work on that project, and I think it’s great that he seems to be willing to continue in the face of a new CF specific IDE.
CF could really benefit from an awesome native IDE that showcases the language, available frameworks, and the new native ORM.
I’ve never had stability issues with Eclipse or with any of the Eclipse plugins I use, and I use them daily. I think probably the biggest issues come from the JVM that you run Eclipse on that makes it have issues. I use Ubuntu as my desktop, and the default JVM that comes with Ubuntu is NOT Sun’s JVM. Once I replace the default java with Sun’s Java, everything runs beautifully. I wonder if you have to do the same thing with Mac’s…
Maybe the best thing Adobe can do with Bolt is standardize the JVM that Bolt runs in. ;) Sort of like what they did by bundling CF with JRun and the JRE.
I haven’t had any stability issues with CFEclipse (my main IDE) and I’m on a Mac that still runs the 1.5 JRE!
From what I’ve seen of Bolt, it looks pretty slick, but the real determining factor for me will be what Adobe decides to charge for it.
At first I thought the Eclipse platform was a good pick (cross platform) but now they have stopped development of Flex Builder for Linux and that casts doubt on a Bolt for Linux either…
It’s also doubtful they’ll support the other CFML engines in Bolt.