Eclipse Indigo and ColdFusion Builder 2 is it a match made in heaven?

Tags: General, ColdFusion 9, ColdFusion Builder

Well it might not be, however I will say that I downloaded this and got everything setup with ease, more on that a bit later on. The one thing that I will have to note though, is how much faster this version is, and when running the 64bit version it is a bit of heaven.

Now on the surface there isn't much to say as it is pretty much the same program, although there are some really not so obvious features, one of which caught my attention. Which is why I wanted to blog about this for awhile now, as it saved me so much time and effort.

But first a little bit of background on how I use this tool.

I never use the standalone version of ColdFusion Builder, that is not to say I don't have it installed, it is that when I am developing I will continue to use it as a plug-in for many reasons. One of those reasons is that I hate reinstalling all my tools for development work, each and every time an update or new version of builder comes about. And that is about to change if Adobe might start using the Indigo version of Eclipse, as you will eventually discover. Now one of the problems going from major releases in Eclipse is updating from, lets say Eclipse 3.5 over to 3.6 and as much as it is possible to do, I sort of feel at times that it is going to not fully update correctly and although I have been lucky so far there is always that chance.

Now enter Indigo, and the rules are getting bent and changed to suit us as developers even more.

So once you have downloaded Eclipse Indigo, and run the application, don't go deleting anything of your last install just yet. When we go to the file menu and select new->other, we can now see that there is a new option called install. If you select this option, you will notice that we can import everything from another installation of Eclipse.

The amount of work that this solves is not even measurable, until you see it in action for yourself. The only downside that I had was that I had gone from a 32bit version of Eclipse over to a64bit version, and there was around 2 or 3 plugins that I rely on heavily, that where just pure 32bit versions and was really not a big deal to reinstall these plugins from scratch.

As I said I wanted to blog about this for awhile now, and I was surprised at how easy it is to do. So now that this feature is available it would be nice that at some point Adobe begin using this, because that was the only real factor that stopped me from ever using the standalone version of ColdFusion Builder.


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  • Andrew Myers's Gravatar Do you need to re-run the installer to hook it up with your Eclipse install, or is there a way to copy over the plug in from the Standalone install?
    # Posted By Andrew Myers | 8/2/11 10:59 PM
  • Andrew Scott's Gravatar Andrew that is a very good question, and the answer is that if you follow this method, and it will only work with the plugin option, is that it will be copied over for you.

    When you install ColdFusion Builder as a plugin, as you might be aware, it is installed separate to Eclipse. That means if you look in your Eclipse directory under the folder dropins, you will see there is a link shortcut there.

    When installing a new version of ColdFusion Builder, one would remove this link while Eclipse is not running, and install ColdFusion Builder as you would normally.
    # Posted By Andrew Scott | 8/2/11 11:07 PM
  • Jeff Borisch's Gravatar Hi Andrew, thanks for this tip. What OS are you on? I've found that 32-bit runs a little more snappy for me, at least up to 3.6. I'm on MacOS 10.6.8 btw. I never noticed much of a difference under Windows.
    # Posted By Jeff Borisch | 8/10/11 12:17 PM
  • Andrew Scott's Gravatar Hi Jeff, I mainly use Eclipse and ColdFusion Builder on Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit edition. And I can say that there is a huge difference in speed with the 32bit version and 64bit version, when running Eclipse and CFB2 on the 32bit version it can take around 2 minutes for me to load all the plugins etc., on the 64bit it is around 20secs.

    Now that may very on your system, but the difference in load times for me is very significant.
    # Posted By Andrew Scott | 8/10/11 12:37 PM

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