Raymond Camden's ColdFusion Blog: If I'm going to use Eclipse for ColdFusion development, what packages do I need?

If I'm going to use Eclipse for ColdFusion development, what packages do I need?

This question just came into my mailbox and I see it enough on cf-talk and other listservs so I figured it warranted a quick blog post. If you are just concerned about doing ColdFusion development with Eclipse, then you want to grab:

CFEclipse - This is the main package for doing CF development with Eclipse. It will give you syntax highlighting, CFC method views, tag completion, etc.

Adobe CF Extensions - This gives you RDS support as well as query building/exploring (you can view your tables and write simple queries as well as testing them). It also gives you the sexy log viewer. This tool lets you watch a log file and as messages are appended, they automatically show up in the viewer. You also get the debugger and snazzy wizards.

Adobe CF Help for Eclipse - The ColdFusion docs for Eclipse

There are certainly other packages a good developer will want, but these will get you going with ColdFusion.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 at 3:32 PM. It was filed in the following categories: Development, ColdFusion. It has been viewed 3,605 times and has 34 comments.

TweetBacks

Comments

[Add Comment] [Subscribe to Comments]

Comment 1 written by evan on 6 January 2009, at 3:47 PM

What about using Aptana? Can I use the cfeclipse plugin in Aptana?
Comment 2 written by Raymond Camden on 6 January 2009, at 3:49 PM

Isn't Aptana an Eclipse plugin? If so, it doesn't make sense to use it "in" Aptana, unless they have a 'branded' Eclipse build. Flex Builder can be used like that - either as a plugin or a full Eclipse build. In that case, then yes, you can install the plugins.
Comment 3 written by Adrian J. Moreno on 6 January 2009, at 3:50 PM

I'd also recommend Aptana to handle all the HTML, Javascript, CSS and other programming that go hand-in-hand with ColdFusion development.

http://www.aptana.com/docs/index.php/Plugging_Apta...
Comment 4 written by Raymond Camden on 6 January 2009, at 3:51 PM

Just to be clear, I wanted to focus this blog entry on _just_ the core stuff devs need for CF. As I said, there are plenty of -very- useful plugins for Eclipse.

Then again, these _are_ comments, and folks can just ignore them.

So um... ignore me. It's your guys blog as much as it is mine. ;)
Comment 5 written by Kumar on 6 January 2009, at 3:53 PM

One recommendation to add good HTML, CSS and JS support is the Aptana Studio.

http://www.aptana.com/docs/index.php/Plugging_Apta...
Comment 6 written by Kumar on 6 January 2009, at 3:54 PM

I am slow at writing comments ;)
Comment 7 written by Wil Genovese on 6 January 2009, at 3:57 PM

Ray,

I use CFEclipse everyday with these installed.

Eclipse 3.4
CFEclipse 1.3.2 beta
Subclipse - so I can access our SVN servers.
Mylyn
JS Eclipse from Adobe Labs.
Web Developer Tools - from the Eclipse download site
EPIC Perl for my PERL Code

I think that's all. I pretty much have the same configuration on my work Windows XP machine as I do on my MacBookPro.

Wil
Comment 8 written by Wil Genovese on 6 January 2009, at 4:04 PM

oh, and of course the Adobe plug-ins you already mentioned.
Comment 9 written by Craig Heneveld on 6 January 2009, at 4:36 PM

There is a stand alone version of aptana that I use. It is not the plugin version of it. It is really awesome!
Comment 10 written by Brian Jones on 6 January 2009, at 5:23 PM

Ray. I am now up and running with Eclipse 3.3.2 with the CFEclipse plugin and the CF801 Adobe Extensions, and it couldn't have been easier!

Thanks for clearing that up.
Comment 11 written by Scott P on 6 January 2009, at 5:27 PM

man - I thought for a sec that dreamweaver had corrupted you to a point you were asking this question.
Comment 12 written by Raymond Camden on 6 January 2009, at 5:29 PM

The greatness that is Ray cannot be contained by one editor.
Comment 13 written by Mike Rankin on 6 January 2009, at 5:51 PM

While we're talking about it here, can anybody verify that the RDS services of the adobe plug-in work with Ganymede?
Comment 14 written by Henry Ho on 6 January 2009, at 7:02 PM

Subclipse & CollabNet Desktops
http://subclipse.tigris.org/
http://www.open.collab.net/downloads/desktops/

Installing both will make merging in SVN 1.5 a breeze~!
Comment 15 written by Mark Galeassi on 6 January 2009, at 7:17 PM

I use the stand alone version of apatana with CFEclipse. It's a great mix!
Comment 16 written by David McGuigan on 6 January 2009, at 7:51 PM

If you're just now getting started with ColdFusion development you owe it to yourself to check out at least your best options.

Here's what you won't hear on most ColdFusion community blogs (my opinion): Probably the best package for an Eclipse ColdFusion development setup is Dreamweaver CS4, which runs as a standalone, totally-external-to-Eclipse plugin substitute.

One of the coolest things about the Dreamweaver package is that you don't even have to have Eclipse installed to run it.

Free trial:
http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/
Comment 17 written by Joern on 7 January 2009, at 2:10 AM

Perhaps a stupid question, but:
Which eclipse package do i need?
(Eclipse Classic,Eclipse IDE for Java Developers....)
Comment 18 written by Martin on 7 January 2009, at 4:14 AM

@David

Eclipse has been so popular in the community because it's FREE and it's a good tool.
For me though there is no comparison - I agree with you and would say that Dreamweaver CS4 is an awesome tool for web development. There are so many integrated features (way too many to list here) that make my life as a web developer SO much easier.

I love it and am glad to have spent the money on my whole Adobe CS4 Web Suite out of my own pocket.
Comment 19 written by Raymond Camden on 7 January 2009, at 6:20 AM

@Joem: Classic should be fine.
Comment 20 written by adam on 7 January 2009, at 7:41 AM

David you made me laugh in the morning with your comment

"One of the coolest things about the Dreamweaver package is that you don't even have to have Eclipse installed to run it"

that is really cool :))))
Comment 21 written by Craig Kaminsky on 7 January 2009, at 8:08 AM

@Mike: The RDS plugins sort of work on my copy of Ganymede (Mac OS X 10.5.6, Eclipse 3.4.1).

The RDS Dataview works but I have to "refresh" the database or table before I can expand it (without the refresh, it never expands the db to see tables or tables to see columns (right-clicking to get to the refresh option or the refresh button on top of the view window works).

I haven't gotten the Services Browser to work on Ganymede with web services.
Comment 22 written by Mike Rankin on 7 January 2009, at 8:17 AM

@Craig: THANKS! At least it works with a little prodding. Very annoying though. You would not believe how long I tried to get that to work before I just gave up. The "Contacting server..." place holder really made me thing something was going on that was blocked.
Comment 23 written by Gerald Guido on 7 January 2009, at 8:25 AM

+1 for Atpana. Atpana has built in SVN support BTW. I also use XMLBuddy for auto suggest for XML dialects ( was never able to get the XML editor in WST to work right.
Comment 24 written by Chris Luksha on 7 January 2009, at 8:36 AM

@Craig - THANK YOU.

I have been fighting with this for days not realizing why it wouldn't work. My old 3.2 eclipse worked with the rds set just fine after removing the port number but the lates set won't let you remove the port - a simple refresh.
Who'd a thunk! Thanks so much!!!!
Comment 25 written by Thomas Case on 7 January 2009, at 10:03 AM

Ray,
One thing you did fail to mention in your post is which version of Eclipse. Actually, there are two decisions, one is product version and the other is package version. CFEclipse has a note on their website regarding the problems working with the latest version of Eclipse (3.4). Therefore, to get started, one should stick with the Europa version of Eclipse (3.3). When you go to the Eclipse downloads page, you need to click on the link for older versions to find Europa.

Once at the Europa downloads, then one needs to decide which package version. There are versions for Java Developers, Java EE Developers, C/C++ Developers, and RCP/Plug-in Developers. The last version provides the source code to aid in developing Eclipse Plug-ins. When I rebuilt my set-up recently, I chose the Java Developers version. It provided the base Eclipse package, plus some of the basic WTP (Web Tools Platform), like XML Editor.

I did add Collabnet's Desktop, SubEclipse, the CF packages you mentioned, and Aptana Community Edition Plug-in to my set up.

A future topic for you to address is how to use Eclipse for CF development. This is one area where I still struggle, specifically when it comes to whether to locate projects in my personal workspace (I am using Windows, both Vista and XP, along with IIS) or in one's web folder (e.g., on Windows, this is typically C:|D:\inetpub). Along with this is when checking out from Subversion, does one check out the entire project, or the trunk/branch they are interested in. This still is confusing to me. While, I like having multiple projects available in the working set, unlike Dreamweaver's single project focus, Dreamweaver's local/remote site setup has worked great (at least when developing on Windows). I develop/test locally, then deploy to a test server for customer review/acceptance testing, and then deploy to production server. In my current case, the production server is a staging server that uses a commercial tool to update the production cluster servers.

Thanks for the post. I hope to see more on this topic. It can be confusing.
Comment 26 written by Kevin on 7 January 2009, at 11:04 AM

re: Aptana ... to clarify Aptana Studio can run both as a standalone app or as a plug-in to other Eclipse installs. And further the standalone edition of Aptana Studio is based on Eclipse too so you can plug other Eclipse plug-ins (like CF Eclipse :) ) into it as well.
Comment 27 written by Henry Ho on 7 January 2009, at 11:39 AM

Waiting for Bolt...

Is Dreamweaver CS4 that good? Anyone else use it for CFC dev?
Comment 28 written by David McGuigan on 7 January 2009, at 11:42 AM

Henry, check out this post's comments, it highlights some of the standout ColdFusion integration features Dreamweaver offers:
http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/index.cfm/2008/11/11...
Comment 29 written by Raymond Camden on 7 January 2009, at 12:54 PM

I started to use DWCS4 late last year when I began writing articles for the DW Dev Center. I was fairly impressed. I'm using it quite a bit now. Will I use it forever? Will it become my primary IDE? Probably not. I'm sure Bolt will. But I'm _very_ impressed by DWCS4, very impressed.
Comment 30 written by Raymond Camden on 8 January 2009, at 9:42 PM

@ThomasCase: Good points on the Eclipse version. I should have mentioned that.

As to actually using Eclipse, I could show an example of what I typically do. To be honest, the old ACME Guide (not sure if it has been updated recently) was the best at this. As to your question about SVN - I always check out the entire project. It's only slow the first time and thats if the project is large.
Comment 31 written by larry c. lyons on 9 January 2009, at 1:56 PM

One of the commercial kits I particularly like is MyEclipse. it has a lot of addition plugins (XML, database, both web and app server controls, deployment editor etc.) One of the plugins in that package I find very useful is the UML plugin. Being able to use one IDE not only to do class and usecase diagrams, Ajax debugging and database support is very useful. Also it has a Dreamweaver like WYSIWYG view that can be very useful. For a full feature list: http://www.myeclipseide.com/module-htmlpages-displ....

regards,
larry

The people who make MyEclipse also have a server based plugin management tool called Pulse (http://www.poweredbypulse.com/). One of the packages included in Pulse is CFEclipse.

regards,
Comment 32 written by Kevin Ford on 2 April 2009, at 8:48 AM

I saw mention of Yoxos (http://www.yoxos.com) on the CFEclipse site and decided to try it last week. Very nice site for building bundled Eclipse packages, similar to MyEclipse but free. Huge selection of plug-ins to choose from. There are a large number of pre-built "profiles" for just about any development role to make things easy. Once done, you can even save and share your custom profiles -- very handy for companies with small development teams that want to use a standard set of plug-ins.

The only thing I had to add that Yoxos didn't offer was XMLbuddy, the Adobe ColdFusion extensions, and Flex Builder (of course).
Comment 33 written by Stefan Lierenfeld on 30 April 2009, at 3:41 AM

I would wonder if anybody knows if there's a plugin availabe providing help topics for cf7 inside the eclipse help system.

Or any hints available to convert the old html based Homesite help files to eclipse plugin format?

thanks anf regards
Comment 34 written by Kevin Ford on 1 May 2009, at 6:43 AM

Hi Stefan,

I don't think there was ever a version created for CF7, but there is one for CF8 (which aside from the new CF8 tags/functions, is still perfectly applicable to CF7). You can download it directly from Adobe at http://www.adobe.com/support/coldfusion/downloads..... Look for the item titled "ColdFusion 8 Help Files for Eclipse".