The real value to me is that if I want something in the editor I don't have to wait around for the yearly release of some commercial editor. I can get my grubby fingers on the source code and fix it myself :)
As Mark said, Matt Christantello mentioned a week or so back that he'd like to have bracket matching in cfeclipse. He put in the time to investigate how to do it and sent us a patch. It went into the CVS sources on Friday and was available for anyone who wanted it from then on.
Barney Boisvert mentioned to me on Friday that one of his bugbears was that block unindent didn't clear spaces as well as tabs and that it might be good to have the option to clear trailing spaces from lines when you save a file. I happened to be working on eclipse on Saturday morning, so his request was done, in the CVS sources and available for download around Saturday lunchtime.
Sometimes there are things that I would like to see in the editor, but don't have time to implement myself. If it's a popular feature request it usually doesn't take very long for someone to add it.
The bottom line is that when I first found out about cfeclipse I had a few things that I wanted to see in the editor. Most of those were pretty quickly added and that gave me some enthusiasm to look deeper into how the thing worked. Being part of the process that creates the editor you use means a lot to most people. Even if you know nothing about java, you almost certainly know what you want to see and do when you're writing CFML and that's valuable input too be it suggesting features, or testing them in the latest builds so that we can try to keep our release builds relatively bug free.
As to the question of speed, I've been working on my old laptop over the week-end. That has 512MB of RAM and a 1.8GHz processor. It also runs just about every database and application server under the sun. I generally find that when I'm building and testing cfeclipse I have to wait from time to time while the computer does some garbage colletion, but for general code writing and that sort of thing it's pretty good.
It would be reasonable to assume that Eclipse will take up somewhere between 80 and 110MB of RAM depending on the plugins you have installed, so if you've usually got more than that free you shouldn't have a problem. If you're already finding paging a problem you will probably need to look at either reducing the number of applications and services you have running, or a more lightweight solution. From memory I think HomeSite 5 chews up somewhere between 30 and 70 MB of RAM.
Processor speed probably won't be an issue any more than it would be for any other application on the same machine.
HTH
Spike
Brett Payne-Rhodes wrote:
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the insight. Sounds like the old PIII might be ok.
The fact that CFeclipse is 'free' seems to get mentioned quite a lot. While I applaud the efforts of people who can afford to give away their time, just because a piece of software is 'free' doesn't really mean much to me. Effectively, Homesite is 'free' for me too as I am a Devnet subscriber. IIS and .asp are both 'free' (as I understand it) after you buy the OS of course - but I don't use either of them even though I own the OS. CF is also not free, and yet we choose to use it (or our employers do) even though PHP is *almost* as good. The list goes on.
I'm not having a go, just making an observation that in the end economics isn't necessarily the key factor in our decisions about the tools we employ.
Thanks again,
Brett B)
Mark Mandel wrote:
I'm using it on a PIII 800 - Atm I am running:
Firefox with 3 tabs Toad Eclipse - CFEclipse (and a variety of other plugins) Groove, Outlook Google Desktop Search ICQ Yahoo McAffee
I will admit, sometimes Eclipse will just freeze (most likely garbage collecting), and opening up a new filetype can be a bit slow, as it brings in the plugins - but it is definatley outweighed by it's fexibility and versatility.
And you can't beat the fact that you can go - 'Hey, can I have bracket highlighting' and within a relatively short period, it's there.
I'd suggest at LEAST giving it a try - (just do one project with it.. not just open and peek around).
Did I mention it's free? ;o)
Mark
On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 09:14:03 +0800, Brett Payne-Rhodes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi,
I've heard people for and against CFEclipse. Those against have mostly made the point that it is *really* slow and that has been enough to put me off trying it. My development machine is a fairly old Dell PIII 600 with 512Mb of memory. Is that a reasonable config for CFEclipse? For people who *are* happy with it, what spec machine are you running it on and what else are you running on the box? Oracle? SQL-Server?
BTW, I use Homesite 5.5+ and am very happy with it...
Thanks,
Brett B)
--
-------------------------------------------- Stephen Milligan Code poet for hire http://www.spike.org.uk
Do you cfeclipse? http://cfeclipse.tigris.org
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