CFUnited Wrap Up Pt 1: CFEclipse

Well, I downloaded the CFEclipse beta plugin, and installed it into a fresh install of Eclipse 3.2. I opened my workbench, set up a project, opened my perspective and everything broke. CFEclipse has always been a great tool, but this beta is way too early, and should probably be scrapped to start over. OK, jokes over. Mark Drew will quietly chuckle at this post, the last time I'll bring up this now old joke from the conference. The fact is, CFEclipse is the new phenom. Everybody loves it. Everybody was talking about it. Every session showing code examples was using it. And everyone from Ben Forta to Sean Corfield to Joe Rinehart (etc., etc....) was telling us "If you're not using it you should be". Those of you who've been following this blog know that we spent quite a bit of time with Mark while in Bethesda. Aside for consuming fairly large amounts of alcohol, we also had the opportunity to give Mark some feedback on CFEclipse features, for which he was furiously taking notes for later updates. In Mark's (paraphrased) words, "This is great. I spend so much time working on CFEclipse (in Java) that sometimes I lose site of what features might be necessary from a (CF) development standpoint." Needless to say, downloads of CFEclipse saw a sharp increase during and after the conference. In a small bit of irony, during the Flex sessions the presenters kept saying "use CFEclipse" for CFC editing, yet Flex 2.0 does not yet work on Eclipse 3.2 (several key features break, including the RDS support), yet the beta ("Beeta", as Mark would say) only works on Eclipse 3.2. I asked Mike Nimer about this during the Flex and ColdFusion Integration session, at which point he stated that an update to Flex would be "a priority." (Side Note: the Eclipse Callisto release, an update to 3.2 for the IDE, as well as several key related projects, came out two days after Ben's keynote announcement about the release of Flex 2.0) The good news? For those who care to do so, Eclipse runs standalone, so you could run 3.1, with the current stable version of CFEclipse, if you wish to do Flex development, while also running 3.2 with the CFEclipse beta for straight CF development. Some features of the beta? Language versioning per project for tag insight and code complete (courtesy of funding from NewAtlanta), Word Wrap (yeah!), and CF dev toolbars similar to those of Dreamweaver or Homesite (for those of you who like that sort of thing). And, straight from the CFEclipse session, the one really cool feature that's been there that most never knew about? The scibble pad. Look it up, you won't regret it.