I just received an email from the ColdFusion Builder developers informing me that a bug I entered (bug# 82358) is fixed. As the snippet of the email below shows the bug fix is in Updater 1. I hope the Updater comes out before the end of my Trial Period. Because I was a beta tester and had the Release Candidate installed I only have 21 days left on my trial version.

I hope the fix was not just increasing the memory allocation in the cfbuilder.ini file. I tried that in the past on Adobe developer recommendations and proved it didn't help. I do also disagree with the "Easy workaround" since my workaround was to use CFEclipse.

Anyways, this is good news because this was one of the main issues I wasn't going to buy ColdFusion Builder. I really want to test this now!

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Many people have been using CFEclipse for several years now and are now migrating to ColdFusion Builder. Since both are Eclipse based products this is pretty simple, but there are a few things that will not migrate without manual intervention.

First start with installing ColdFusion Builder. (See this.)

Next lets import your CFEclipse Projects. You can do this and it is easy since it is really an Eclipse feature not specific to any add-ons. Right click in the Navigator view and choose "Import". The windows that opens give you many options for what to import. You are going to click and expand the "General" folder and then choose "Existing Projects into a Workspace" and click the Next Button.

If you are using an SVN and you plan to use an Eclipse SVN plug-in in ColdFusion Builder install that plug in before importing your projects, the import process will automatically reconnect the imported projects to your SVN(s). You will also want to configure the SVN plug-in to access all repositories before you run the imports.

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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.

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Adobe Labs has released ColdFusion Builder Public Beta 3.  One of the first things you will notice is they upgraded the code version of Eclipse to 3.5.1 Galileo.  For me this was good news since in my normal Eclipse build I’ve switched from the Subclipse plug-in to Subversive which is now part of the Eclipse project, as my SVN client. All you need to do is add the Galileo Update Site (http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo). Then select Collaboration --> Subversive SVN Team Provider.  You can also choose to select the Subversive SVN Integration for the Mylyn Project at the same time.

If you read the docs, and I really suggest you do, you will notice Adobe also added full AIR development support.

I’ve also noticed a fair amount of improvement in the startup time on both my Mac and my pathetic Windows computer at work.

Also new in Beta 3 is the Adobe Community Help AIR application Beta.  Select Help --> ColdFusion Builder Help to launch the AIR application.  In addition to being able to search the local help documents it appears this is an AIR application that is a proxy to Adobe LiveDocs and ColdFusion Blogs that are aggregated via Adobe Feeds (http://feeds.adobe.com/) including my blog.  The search interface automatically brings up related content from the Adobe help docs and blogs. This makes it much easier to search on a general topic rather than just searching for various CF tags or functions.

So far Beta 3 is looking pretty good. There are still bugs and you can report the bugs you find using the public bug tracker http://cfbugs.adobe.com/bugreport/flexbugui/cfbugtracker/main.html.

That's all for now.

Last night I upgraded my MacBook Pro from Leopard to Snow Leopard.  I used the upgrade method instead of the clean install.  So far I cannot tell that anything is different.  This really does look and feel like an under the hood upgrade.  At this point I have not dug into Snow Leopard UI changes, but I have been testing software.

I've had the public beta of ColdFusion Builder installed since it came out and after upgrading to Snow Leopard there seems to be no issues at all with ColdFusion Builder.  Well there is one thing I just notice.  Startup of ColdFusion Builder is lightning fast now.  I also fired up my CFEclipse on Eclipse 3.5 installation to compare.

ColdFusion Builder starts in 5 seconds flat and is ready to use after 7 seconds.  CFEclipse took a full 20 seconds to get up and running on the first start.  After shutting it down and restarting it also started in 5 seconds and ready to go in 7 seconds.  Also note that I have the same extra plugins installed in both IDE's; Subclipse, Mylin Bridge, EPIC Perl and Shell ED.  So it looks like everything for me to do my ColdFusion coding is working on Snow Leopard.

Next is to test my ColdFusion 8 install. It runs, but I have to check to see if it is still connected to Apache and if my Apache and hosts file settings are still in tack.

Then onto my PostgreSQL database installed via Mac Ports.

For reference, my MacBook Pro is a 2.2Ghz Intel Core Duo with 4Gb of ram and a 120Gb hard drive.