On Wednesday, Aug 27, 2003, at 03:03 US/Pacific, dwayne wrote:
> About 9 – 11 months ago I spent about 10 minutes of my time responding
> to a macromedia’s ColdFusion survey and I have yet to see the results.
I would think that Red Sky (CFMX 6.1) was the result, for the most
part...
> Would you all agree, that us ColdFusion developers deserve some love
> too!!
Considering Allaire (and ColdFusion) might have withered away without
Macromedia's investment in the technology, I'd say that CFers got quite
a bit of love...
> Sure ColdFusion MX sports a bunch of new features that are fantastic
> and the as for old advanced features – they’re tighter than ever. I'm
> loving cffunction, I'm all over cfc's, and ColdFusion's ability to
> integrate with FLASH is the best thing since the last "best thing".
Excellent! Glad you're happy with that at least (especially since quite
a few CFers beat on Macromedia over the 'promotion' of Flash to CFers
and the whole OO issues around CFCs).
> However, despite all of these wonderful improvements in the server
> application, I'm still not convinced that they have committed to
> providing us with a solid "Development Environment" that supports the
> work habits of the sophisticated ColdFusion Developer.
I think part of the problem here is that your chosen IDE becomes your
second-nature way of working and it's really hard to change. Several
high-profile CFers have made the jump to Dreamweaver and are very happy
- and some aren't. Dreamweaver is certainly a very different tool to
HomeSite / CF Studio. However, CF Studio used to cost $499 and now you
can get it (as HomeSite+) for just $399 by buying Dreamweaver. And
there's a 5.5 version in the works so it's not like Macromedia's
abandoned anyone here:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/homesite/
Me personally, I tried CF Studio back in 2001 and just couldn't get
along with it at all. I figured that since Macromedia bought Allaire
and we'd be using ColdFusion, I ought to use the dedicated IDE. I
really tried. But I kept going back to Dreamweaver for so many things.
And it wasn't really anything specific that I could put my finger on
and say "You know, if CFS just did 'X' (or didn't do 'Y' every time I
try 'Z') then I'd be happy..." No, it was just a general usability
issue for me - CF Studio just didn't suit me.
So I switched back to Dreamweaver (well, UltraDev 4, actually). Then
Dreamweaver MX came out and swallowed (the higher-priced) UltraDev and
I was still a happy camper! The CFC and Web Service browsers are very
useful (I showed how to use the latter to quickly build CF applications
that consume Web Services in a BACFUG presentation a while back).
Then I switched to a Mac. Dreamweaver MX (6.0) was not as good on the
Mac as on Windows so I struggled for a while and switched to jEdit. It
wasn't ideal for me... I found it clunky and ugly and the CF support
wasn't great but it was faster and more stable than DWMX 6.0 on the
Mac. Then the 6.1 updater came out and totally solidified the Mac
version: it was much faster and rock solid. So I switched, gratefully,
back to DWMX as my primary CF IDE.
I can't talk about Dreamweaver MX 2004 much (for obvious reasons!) but
I'm using a recent (internal) build and I'm very happy with it.
Site-less editing has probably been the biggest help in my workflow as
well as the new Start Page with its list of recently edited files and
various common operations.
> Dreamweaver still seems to be an overkill designers solutions.
Hmm, I think depends on your perspective. I'm certainly not a designer
- I'm a hardcore developer - but Dreamweaver fits my workflow just
fine. I don't use all of its features but I use enough to make it
worthwhile (e.g., I live and die in "sites" even tho' I find the new
site-less editing mode very useful).
> and as for Contribute, it must have been the boses, daughter's
> boyfriend cousin's idea.
I'm a huge advocate of Contribute for quick updates to static sites
(and there's a lot of those). I use Contribute all the time to maintain
project intranet sites as well as parts of my personal website. My wife
uses Contribute to manage her website (which I set up in Dreamweaver) -
my wife is fairly typical of the sort of users Contribute is aimed at.
You might also be interested to know that sections of macromedia.com
are managed using Contribute - end-user content contribution for HTML
sites is its forte.
Sean A Corfield -- http://www.corfield.org/blog/
"If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive."
-- Margaret Atwood
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