On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 2:19 PM, Dave Burns <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I'm considering moving on from Dreamweaver and finally using a better IDE for
> CF work. I know of CFBuilder and have downloaded the trial to eval. I used
> IntelliJ for some Java projects 2 years ago and it was outstanding.
FWIW, I'm a relatively recent IDEA (IntelliJ) convert, and I love it.
They have a 30 day trial too; you might as well give it a shot.
It's just really smart, in a million productivity enhancing and code
quality inducing ways. Really extensive customizable keyboard
shortcuts, variable and function completion, tons of languages, great
snippet support, works with projects and also freeform File > Open or
dbl-click in explorer, file structure view that bogs down quite a bit
less than CFB (at least the version I tried when it was released),
shortcut to go to the definition of the function under the cursor,
even in an unrelated file up the dir tree over and down, indexes
everything for fast searching, nice favorites functionality, syntax
error highlighting, camelcase-aware spellchecker (a bit buggy but
great anyway), just a lot of things that make using it a pleasure.
It's not all lollipops and rainbows though. While the program itself
is really outstanding, the CFML plugin is somewhat immature. To begin
with, you may find it a bit awkward starting your first project,
because it doesn't make it clear how you do that for CFML, or have
CFML-oriented tools for it (just choose java for now). It also doesn't
fully understand CFML variable and function visibility, so for
instance things declared in a cfinclude are flagged as unresolved
references and completion doesn't work on them. During my 30 day
trial, they fixed 15 bugs I reported (!!!), plus others, but the pace
of development seems uneven, and slow these days. A number of pretty
obvious flaws and enhancements have been filed by various folks, with
not a lot of movement on them lately. Also, I'm on windows, but I've
heard several times that on a mac, out of the box it's u-g-l-y; if
that's you, go for the GTK+ theme immediately, before you hate it.
The really big downside is no debugger. Both the FusionDebug and
FusionReactor teams have said their products were designed for
multiple host environments, and expressed eagerness to collaborate
with IntelliJ, but so far nothing's come of that, beyond a statement
that it's under discussion. I personally think that the investment
required to make that happen would make IDEA so much more visible and
attractive in the marketplace that it would pay for itself many times
over, and have said so, but so far all I can say is I hope it happens,
but we'll see.
I think to some extent Sean is right that the plugin doesn't get the
resources it could use, and their reluctance to pony up for a debugger
is a symptom. Far as I know, there's one dev working on it, and she's
great, but also have other commitments.
So it appears that I wrote more about downsides than its awesomeness,
but that's totally not how I actually feel. I'm happier with IDEA than
I've ever been with a development environment. If it never got any
better than it is now, I'd still be using it. Try it, I think you'll
like it. You probably know this, but the CFML plugin works only with
the paid version not the free Community edition. There's a google
group here if you have questions:
http://groups.google.com/group/cfml-plugin-for-intellij-idea
Dave
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|
Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now!
http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion
Archive:
http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:339392
Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm
Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/unsubscribe.cfm
