So I was perusing the list of new features in Dreamweaver CS4, and I don’t see ANY improvements for ColdFusion coding. There are a couple of new features that will be nice for CF developers, but they aren’t directly related to CF (unless I missed something). Personally I use CFEclipse. But I have been telling my co-workers and friends that I am convinced that Adobe is going to release an Eclipsed based ColdFusion IDE with CF 9 for four reasons:
- Ever since Macromedia stopped developing CF Studio/Homesite, there have been a LOT of people in the community that have been calling for a “real” CF IDE (like Visual Studio for ASP.Net, or Komodo IDE for PHP).
- Adobe already has Eclipse based ColdFusion tools like built-in CF documentation and the CF debugger.
- Adobe has been talking about “Improved developer experience” as one of the focuses for CF 9.
- Flex is Eclipse based.
So I’m wondering if the continued lack of CF love in Dreamweaver is more proof that Dreamweaver is NOT intended to be the future path for CF development tools from Adobe. Of course, Adobe will always support Dreamweaver/CF as long as CF developers use it, but I suspect it will be like Homesite+. They won’t add any new CF features, but they’ll continue to release language updates for Dreamweaver along with new versions of ColdFusion.