Today Adobe released ColdFusion Builder 1.0. It's been a long time coming and a lot of people have been patiently waiting for this day. Unfortunately Adobe should have waited longer and fixed more of the outstanding bugs and painful performance issues. Then to add to the insult, the price was set at $299 but that does include Flash Builder 4 Standard. However, I still find it way too high of a price for a product that does NOT measure up. As others will note Flash Builder 4 Standard cost $249 so essentially you are paying $50 for ColdFusion Builder. This is great if you wanted to buy Flash Builder. Many of us never touch Flash so this is not much of a bargain.

Then there are performance issues. ColdFusion Builder is painfully slow when it comes to rebuilding project workspaces. It works fine for little projects, but serious enterprise level web applications with thousands of files and folders, such as what I work on, ColdFusion Builder is just slow or worse yet if just fails and throws errors. I've recorded this as a bug and nothing has been done about the problem as far as I can tell.

Using SVN integration makes ColdFusion Builder even slower. The first letter in IDE stands for "Integrated", so naturally I want my SVN integrated as well and since ColdFusion Builder is based on Eclipse this is easy to do. You have a few choices for Subversion clients. I've tried Subclipse and Subversive. Both are equally slow when added to ColdFusion Builder. Interestingly though both are faster when installed in CFEclipse. The issue in my mind is not the SVN client but ColdFusion Builder itself. Again I logged a bug and it is still not resolved.

ColdFusion Builder is a resource hog. Proof is that during testing the solution to any Out of Memory errors was to simply modify the cfbuilder.ini file (which has the JVM settings) and increase the allocated memory. As it stands now the default memory allocation is 512Mb. That is a big footprint.

There are many other bugs including just basic editing problems like the editor pane shifts to the left when editing long lines that made you have to scroll to the right. Every keystroke the editor shifts left and stays there until you type another character then it shifts right so you can see what you typed and when you type another it shifts left. This has also been logged as a bug by many people and confirmed by Adobe but not fixed.

There are color coding issues and a large number of missing features that you will find in CFStudio, Dreamweaver and CFEclipse. Adobe felt they had to release the product short on features just to have a product released and then upgrade it later.

Upgrading brings me to my final point. The Eclipse foundation allows for updates right in Eclipse. Its a built in feature and you're done after a simple restart. This works great on minor version updates and even some larger point version upgrades. Eventually you do get to a point in the update process where you may be better off doing a full reinstall for example when Eclipse has a major version upgrade. However, ColdFusion Builder does not utilize the update feature. We've never been able to upgrade, during testing, to the next version. Each time it is a full uninstall and then reinstall and set up a NEW workspace. So far I've never been able to reuse an existing workspace. This means with every minor upgrade I've had to reinstall ColdFusion Builder, my Subversive plugin, setup my SVN client and connections, re-import my projects, and redo my ColdFusion settings. I've done this so many times that I started a document just to keep track of the steps I take and to document the fastest and most correct way to install/reinstall ColdFusion Builder. Upon the release of ColdFusion Builder I was hoping to publish that as a blog post so people new to the Eclipse platform could have a quick start guide. Instead I have to recommend that you be very careful in deciding to install ColdFusion Builder unless you are already indoctrinated into the Eclipse way of doing things.

If you are interested in seeing the bugs that are still outstanding or the feature requests for features that have been left out you can view the public bug tracker for ColdFusion Builder at http://cfbugs.adobe.com/bugreport/flexbugui/cfbugtracker/main.html.

I really hope that Adobe addresses the outstanding bugs real soon and releases regular patches via an update site because the last thing I wanted to post this morning was a downer post about ColdFusion Builder. In my humble opinion it is just not ready for the prime time.

This entry was posted on March 22, 2010 at 12:56 AM and has received 3035 views. There are currently 8 comments. Print this entry.