About two and a half years ago, I got my first look at something called “Bolt.” It was an early alpha of what would go on to become ColdFusion Builder. I remember thinking, nothing could get me to switch IDEs. Two years later, I can’t believe I ever lived without it.
That’s why I’m thrilled to join in announcing the ColdFusion Builder team is releasing Coldfusion Builder 2 Beta to Labs today.
ColdFusion Builder has a ton of cool features, and I’m sure the usual suspects will give you a complete run down. But I’ll focus on what they’ve done to win me over with this release.
First, they focused on making it not just an editor, but an extremely productive one. More shortcuts are available, those shortcuts are more configurable, and you can create your own.
One of my favorite new features is called Quick Fix, which is a little hard to explain, but awesome when you get it. Let’s say you’re working in a file, and you know you need a function down the road but don’t want to stop your flow to go off and write it. So you write the call out, and your editor gives you red squiggly lines telling you that the function is undefined. But ColdFusion Builder gives you a yellow squiggly. This isn’t that exciting, except that when you see a yellow squiggly, you can hit a shortcut and get the option to generate that function. ColdFusion Builder will then generate the function definition for you, including typing any arguments in it based on what you passed into it when you wrote the call. Very cool, very productive. It’s also not limited to just functions. You can create standalone functions this way, or functions in existing CFCs, or even CFCs.
Finally, my favorite feature from ColdFusion Builder 1 is getting an upgrade. ColdFusion Builder Extensions have gotten some cool treatment from the team. There is tons more interactivity between the server and the IDE. Extensions can now launch in views, instead of a modal box. Finally, extensions can even add their own custom Code Assist.
All of these features and more are available for download today on Labs. Get it, try it out, and get more productive, today.
Go get it at http://adobe.com/go/cb2.