Chris Mallinson

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).

(more…)

If you are a web developer, and you spend a lot of time writing code, and you use a Mac, you need to use Coda.

Download it here

Coda is marketed as “one window web development” and it really is. I’ve been going back and forth between Dreamweaver and Eclipse for coding over the past few years, and both are great tools. I still use Eclipse for large sites at work, but I needed something for building small sites, and for quickly editing sites I’ve built in the past.

Coda lets you set up as many sites as you want, and for each site, remembers which files you have open. To make a change, you edit the file, or files and hit publish. It FTPs the files in the background, and keeps everything synchronized. You can even edit files directly on the remote site, which is great if you have specific server config files that you don’t want to be synchronized.

Also, code recognition is available for HTML, CSS, Javascript, Actionscript, Coldfusion, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Python, and several more. Coda is one of those programs that I’m happy to pay for. It’s $79, but will save you time every single day. There is a free trial that I think is fully functional.

Give it a try.