Nice write-up Sean! For all my ranting and raving about DW today, I actually prefer it over HomeSite for a number of reasons. Having said that, there are many areas that DW falls short, I'll try to list some of the items that would make a difference to me, and possibly to other long term HomeSite users (I've used ColdFusion Studio 3 to HomeSite 5.5+, but I've also used DW since version 1, and UltraDev when it was released up to and including DW 2004).
1) Dreamweaver's file panel is difficult to navigate because the files and the folders are all nested together in a very small area. HomeSite and Windows Explorer for example, divide the files and folders in an easy to use fashion. Solution: Make an option to view the file/site structure in that manner. 2) Combined with (1), is the interesting choice of not showing the full file path in the title bar, or somewhere. Again, in HomeSite, you can see exactly which file you are editing, but in DW, if you are looking at the same file in both the dev server and the edition on your workstation, you CANNOT easily tell which one is which. Solution: display the full filepath in the titlebar, or another reasonable location, AND show the full filepath when mousing over the document title tabs. 3) Having 2 file/site panels is a very nice feature. Keep in mind HomeSite has 1 Project and 2 File panels! 4) Lack of support for Source Control systems, HomeSite supports VSS, CVS, etc. And it appears that because HomeSite support SCC, it inherently supports more Source Control systems without additional development by the user. 5) Rigid customizability. HomeSite let you add icon groups, remove them, add icons, re-arrange, etc. DW gives you Favorites area to do that in, and that's it. 6) The HomeSite query builder was pretty decent to work in, put something like that in. 7) Interactive debugging! That's really going to be more useful in the age of OO with CF. 8) I miss the tree view that was in HomeSite (and also was in DW until MX I think) 9) There's a number little annoying things missing, such as convert tags to lowercase, a code sweeper/source formatting that understand comments and 'middle' tags (cfelse), go to end of tag hotkey, code collapse and so forth. 10) Improve performance even more! Anyway, it does make sense that DW is a better business choice for MM, in particular because it is cross-platform, but I think a RAD language is definitely well served by having a RAD tool! There's my 2 copper... Calvin -----Original Message----- From: Sean Corfield [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 1:29 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: John Dowdell Wants to Know What's Wrong with Macromedia On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 11:49:22 -0500, Michael Dinowitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > As for community, this complaint has come up on the MM forums, the HoF > lists, non-HoF lists and at just about every CF conference that exists. > These places combined makes the CF community and while the entire community > is not upset with the loss of Homesite, a good portion of it is. You're right. This is a fairly long-standing issue and a large(?) number of CFers are not happy with the MM party line on this. This is a thorny issue with no really good resolution. Let me just be crystal clear here that what I am about to say is my opinion and may well not reflect MM's policy/plans/whatever. I'm not in the tools division. I don't actually have much insight into MM's future plans in that area. I just want to comment on what I perceive as some of the possible business issues behind this issue, as I see them, as a CF developer. Furthmore, I've used DW, UltraDev, CF Studio, CFEclipse and He3. My tool of choice was UltraDev until DWMX. I never liked CF Studio (and now don't even have the option of using it since I'm on a Mac). These days I use CFEclipse for most of my CF development and DW for all my UI work. So... When MM acquired Allaire, MM inherited JRun Studio, CF Studio and HomeSite which were three separate variants of the same Delphi code base (Windows only). Oh, and Kawa. MM already had DW and UltraDev (Windows and Mac; also variants of one code base). UltraDev was effectively MM's offering for server scripting development. Looking at this from MM's point of view, would you want to support five variants of two code bases (plus Kawa), of which three (four?) were not cross-platform? The UD functionality was effectively merged into DWMX. JRun Studio was dropped, as was Kawa (lots of competition in the Java IDE space so no money to be made there really, in my opinion). CF Studio was renamed HomeSite+ and bundled with DW (meaning you could now buy CF Studio for $100 less than it used to cost and you got DW for free!). A lot of CFers will never accept DW, no matter whether it eventually supports everything HS+ does. Choice of IDE is a very personal and often very passionate choice for a lot of people. They perceive DW (rightly or wrongly) as "bloatware" because it does all the 'designer stuff' that they don't want. That means that there is actually less and less incentive to support, in DW, *everything* that HS+ does - and only incentive to support features that are important to CFers who either use DW today or would switch to / upgrade to DW tomorrow based on some killer feature. See, if you all switched to DW, there would be more DW customers that wanted CF support but all the time you stay with HS+, you're actually holding back CF support in DW... :) And so to HS+... It's certainly not going to sprout new CF support features that DW doesn't have (what about MM's Mac CF user base?) and it's unlikely to even sprout additional CF support features that have already been added to DW (e.g., CFC support)... I mean, where is the financial benefit of duplicating those features in Delphi for a product that is already given away free with DW? And then there's CFEclipse. Free. Code-centric. Supports CFCs. Aimed at *developers*. Likely to be a migration path for CFS/HS+ users who would otherwise just stick with CFS/HS+ forever. If all the CFS/HS+ users migrate to either DW or CFE, MM would no longer have to support CFS/HS+ at all (hurray! those folks working on the Delphi code base could spend their time enhancing CFMX which would benefit all of us!). Also, the better DW and CFE support CF, the more that enhances CF's reputation ("it has really good IDE support, so it's definitely worth using CF"). At least, that's how I see it. If you think there really is a good business case for major work to be done on HS+, let's hear it. Or perhaps some other approach? -- Sean A Corfield -- http://www.corfield.org/ Team Fusebox -- http://www.fusebox.org/ Breeze Me! -- http://www.corfield.org/breezeme Got Gmail? -- I have 5 invites to give away! 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