The Eclipse Open Source IDE coupled with the CFML plugin, CFEclipse, has been embraced by the ColdFusion community for years. All of my sites were built with HomeSite and Dreamweaver. I was waiting for a good excuse to start a site from scratch in Eclipse. Three weeks later, I am loving the functionality, power and ease. The Kool-Aid is quite delicious.
My Current Setup
Right now, I have “Ganymede” the current version of Eclipse. Along with that I installed a few plugins that are a vital part of making the application so powerful:
CFEclipse
CFEclipse is the essential plugin for ColdFusion developers. There so many features that make this plugin great. Some of the more powerful features:
Code Folding - Which manually or automatically collapses code from view.
Bracket Highlighting - Which changes the pairs brackets, parens, and squiggles different colors when your are next to one.
Integrated Browser - Run your pages from within Eclipse
Scribble Pad - This has kept my project code from being littered with test.cfm type of pages. It is a defined page within is accessed by a toolbar button which allows you to run your code inside of Eclipse before you add it to your project. It works nice for small chunks of code.
Dynamic Snippets - add variables to your snippets before they are inserted onto the page.
TODO task list - Simply add the text “TODO:” to your ColdFusion comments and they are all reference in a “Tasks”. Good for going back to finished incomplete code or assigning tasks to other team members.
SnipEX - This is a wonderful feature to create and share snippets. You can host your own SnipEx snippets to share with your team or get them from public servers. Some notable SnipEX server URLs are the following:
ColdFusion 8 Extensions for Eclipse
This plugin is release by Adobe and is a CFC and AS code generation from you database schemas. It also give you a “Components Explorer” view gives you a look at the available components.
Subclipse
This is plugin or Eclipse that plays nice with the CFEclipse perspective to give you the functionality to get at and manage your SVN code repository. Subclipse works well for team development and you don’t need to use Tortoise or go to a command line for commits, updates and syncronization.
Aptana
Aptana is good for syntax highlighting of CSS files and it’s boasts itself as an IDE for creating Adobe AIR applications. It also gives you an environment for developing in PHP, Ruby on Rails, and Python.
This are the plugins I have been using for the last few weeks that has made it a joy to code in Eclipse. I’m curious to know what CF developers are using for their plugins. Let me know, I’m still finding pieces in the toolset to make me code more efficiently.
