Not in code

It’s been about a week since I started using Eclipse for my all of Coldfusion development at work, so I figured that it’s about time I post an update on my original post about this.

Overall my experience has been very pleasant to say the least. The installation procedure was very straightforward and took about 20 minutes in total, including the installation of any additional plugins but not including download time. The actual installation procedure is already described at several other sites so I won’t describe it here.

Currently, my Eclipse environment consists of:

• Eclipse SDK 3.0 (with all the default plugins)
• CFEclipse 1.1.9 (currently an unstable release but very good)
• Snips 1.1.8 for CFEclipse (very good)
• XMLBuddy 2.0.10 (ordinary)
• CSSEditor 0.0.4 (Not yet tested)
• JFaceDB 2.2.1 (Not yet tested)

The syntax highlighting for CFEclipse is excellent and pretty much exactly the same as Dreamweaver MX 2004. Eclipse also “appears” a lot quicker to load up and use than Dreamweaver MX 2004 on my PC at work, an Athlon 2600+ with 512MB of RAM. The snips file for CFEclipse seems very comprehensive without any visible performance penalties. My only complaint so far has been that I need to type “Ctrl+Space” to get the auto completion to work most of the time. I don’t know why this is yet and it may just be a configuration thing (read user error) I’ve read recently that this is a bug that will be fixed in the next version of CFEclipse. It’s not a huge drawback anyway and may even be a good thing because it’s a feature that could get annoying after a while.

Another feature that I love is the “Tasks” feature. This is built into Eclipse and is not specific to CFEclipse. I love the fact that you can attach tasks to specific line nos. It would be even cooler if it would automatically create a task for “TODO” comments. Being able to categorise tasks would also be useful, but hey, it’s still pretty useful as it is.

Right next to the “Tasks” tab is a “Problems” tab part of CFEclipse which highlights errors in the files that you have recently worked with. An example of a problem might be a <cfif> tag without a closing tag. This is really a superb feature, if only it worked correctly. It does not appear to handle nested comments very well and sometimes reports problems in code that has been commented out and also comes up with errors that are not really errors (e.g. name is a required attribute for <cfmodule>, this is not true). Bummer. I’ve read recently that this is a new feature that will be developed further in a subsequent release if CFEclipse

Finally, I’ve left the best feature for last – The outline view. Some of you may have com accross ouline views in various XML editors. The XML is displayed in a tree like outline whose branches can be expanded and collapsed allowing you to quickly navigate to a particular spot in your code. CFEclipse 1.1.9 does this for Coldfusion – verrrry handy. It even displays various common tags using different icons (so it’s easy to spot a stray for instance). This really is an excellent feature and probably deserves a screenshot. I’ll try and post a few soon.

Actually I lied. The best feature of CFEclipse might be the outline view, but the best feature of Eclipse itself is definitely the browser likr “back button”. I LOVE this feature and I think that anyone who has accidently hit “Ctrl + W” instead of “Ctrl + S” will as well. It takes you back to to the most recent spot that you were working on, even reopening the file and repositioning the cursor if the file is not open anymore.

Wow – this is turning out to be a really long post. I think I’m gonna end today’s update there and leave you with this link to a comparison of CFEclipse and HE3 a commercial CFMX plugin for Eclipse at Sean Corfield’s blog.

Finally, something I really should have said when I origingally posted this, congratulations to the CFEclipse team on an excellent job