Andrew's ramblings

ColdFusion Builder released – some bugs marked fixed are not.

Tags: Coldfusion

Well as we all know by now is that ColdFusion Builder has been released, and don't get me wrong as the product is a fairly stable 1.0 release, and I use that term with grit teeth. One of the things that I logged as a bug was when Adobe removed the help for both ColdFusion and ColdFusion Builder from within the IDE.

For some reason the ColdFusion help made it back in and that's sort of good news, but what ever happened to the ColdFusion Builder help? As you can see by the following image, it never actually got put back in. For someone who wishes to read the help and code, or try things at the same time you are going to have to forget it and get used to having to screen/window swap.

What annoys me the most about Adobe how they want you to think that they have created a product that is helping you be more productive, and in a lot of areas they are. But the one thing that seems to be overlooked is the help that is supposed to be apart of the product, going back and forth from one screen / window to another to read and program or even to try things out, is counter intuitive to say the least.

Which is why this bug was raised in the first place, Adobe claimed that this would be fixed upon final release. And yet as you can see the ColdFusion Builder Help is missing, totally.

Another problem that hasn't been fixed, is when you remove ColdFusion Builder from an installed Eclipse version as a plugin. It was reported almost 12 months ago that when removing and installing ColdFusion Builder as a plugin, it seemed to be leaving parts of it behind. For example, as you can see by the following screen shot. That another major problem is when you uninstall ColdFusion Builder, and reinstall it.

As you can see the perspective becomes a little screwed,if you uninstall and reinstall for each attempt to reinstall will see another <> wrapped around the perspective name.

I can't for the life of me think how Adobe could not get this right, but they haven't and it can be a pain in the but to manually go in and remove the perspective and open the correct perspective. Not to mention having to manually delete each one that shouldn't be there. The biggest downside to this problem is that you will have to reset you custom workbench settings, so if you are like me who arranges the windows to maximise the space I use, then be prepared to go down this road every time. This might not be a problem for users right now, as I am sure that you will not go through the process of uninstalling and reinstalling. But when a new version of ColdFusion Builder is released, this will be a major problem that Adobe must fix in the next release urgently.

Other problems I have reported that have not been fixed are actually more serious, and they involve the line debugger. Some of these bugs have been reported back in the days of the pre-release of ColdFusion 8. So it does go to show how long these bugs have been around for, as one might not know is that the line debugger is based on the older ColdFusion 8 eclipse plugin.

Some of these problems are that under certain conditions, that are reproducible, the break point will not fire. This might not sound like a serious problem, and that is until you have a bug you wish to track down and the line bugger runs a few lines of the function, and then just exists, and you find that around 10-15 lines of code was just skipped. I could go into more problems like setting a line break will not work until you stop the debugger and restart it, or even have to restart ColdFusion itself.

So if anything these are problems that I hope that Adobe spend the time to address quickly, especially the debugger as these problems have been around for like 3-4 years and still haven't been fixed.

To recap, does ColdFusion Builder give you more productivity? The answer is yes, it does and more. I think that in time the fact that you can extend the IDE through the ColdFusion server with extensions is going to show some very nice projects evolve. And even though as I stated this is an initial release, I think Adobe should still be fairly proud that they have released something that the community has been asking for.

Now if I can find a way to actually use the initial release on my machine, as it thinks that I have used up my 30 days already. Not even a day has gone by, oh well I really wanted to reformat my HD and reinstall every thing anyway, not!

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