Please download the latest version of the Flash Player from Adobe.com

New ColdFusion IDE - BOLT announced at MAX

November 18, 2008 2:24 PM

Finally I can talk about this out loud. We announced just minutes ago in the day 2 key note at MAX that the CF team at Adobe is hard at work on an Eclipse based IDE for ColdFusion development, codenamed Bolt. The codename Bolt comes from some nostalgia of the past lightning bolt in the old CF logo but also reminds us that CF is RAD and we're commmitted to giving CF developers more RAD tools and features. Bolt will be tightly integrated with Centaur, but will be a separate product release and available separately from Centaur. Similar to Gumbo, with which Bolt is also tightly integrated, Bolt is another perspective in Eclipse, specifically for CF development. Bolt will make creating traditional web applicatons faster and RIA dev easier than ever. Some features of Bolt announced today are:

- Object Relational Mapping auto-configuration
- Application Code Generation
- Server management
- Easily extensible through the Eclipse framework
- CFML, HTML, Javascript, and CSS Syntax Highlighting
- Code assist for tags, functions, variables, and components
- Code folding
- Snippet creation and management
- Outline viewing
- RDS Explorer for files and databases
- Line-level Debugging

To join the Bolt and/or Centaur betas once they are available, please go to Adobe labs pages:

Bolt information & beta application
Centaur information & beta application

If you're not a search engine, you should install Flash.

23 |

| 3717 Views

Comments (Comment Moderation is enabled. Your comment will not appear until approved.) | Add Comment

	Great news - please, please make Centaur complier default to utf-8. Eclipse does add BOMs to files like DreamWeaver which means you have to add cfprocessingdirective to everything which is "kludgy". Make UTF-8 the default - I am sure anything else will be in the minority.
	Posted By johans \| 11/18/08 2:53 PM

	Sorry - that should be "Eclipse does NOT add BOMs..."
	Posted By johans \| 11/18/08 2:54 PM

	Please make sure the debugger is full-featured!!!! We've been needing a real debugger in CF for such a long time that this feature would make the IDE worth it by itself. Oh yeah, and please let it have Intellisense for developer created components... not just built in CFML functions and tags :) Thanks you!!
	Posted By Brian FitzGerald \| 11/18/08 3:28 PM

	@Brian - We do have a full feature debugger, FusionDebug works with CF 6, 7, and 8. It is a great debugger.
	Posted By Mike Henke \| 11/18/08 3:57 PM

	@Mike - great point, FusionDebug is an excellent tool. However, I personally feel that CFML developers should not have to buy a totally separate product to get something as fundamental as a debugger.
	Posted By Brian FitzGerald \| 11/18/08 4:56 PM

	True free is good, but Adobe's first try with the debugger in cf8 was not great from my usage. It felt Adobe added the debugger last minute, compared to FusionDebug. Hopefully their second try is better.
	Posted By Mike Henke \| 11/18/08 5:50 PM

Does anyone else feel that Adobe may have missed a trick here? Why develop your own IDE when CFEclipse has had so much work put into it? It seems strange, when you could have adopted CFE as an Adobe-owned or Adobe-sponsored product, adding new functionality and improving the lives of all CF developers.

After all the hard work Mark and co. have put into CFE, it just seems like reinventing the wheel to me, which is almost always something to be avoided.

</cliff>

Posted By Cliff Pearson | 11/19/08 4:38 AM

	@ Brian FitzGerald Umm. There's already a line debugger in CF8 that plugs right into Eclipse using Adobe's free plugin.
	Posted By Tom Chiverton \| 11/19/08 6:47 AM

Kristen: Please consider including SQL syntax highlighting for in-line queries, along with some level of syntax highlighting that is aware of the popular JS toolsets like jQuery, etc. SQL syntax highlighting is one of the reasons I still use Rob Rohan's excellent Eclipse plugin AFAE with its ability to deal reasonably well with multi-technology file in its syntax highlighting (e.g., a .cfml file that contains CFML, HTML, JS, CSS, and SQL all appropriately and consistently highlighted).

Posted By Ron Stewart | 11/19/08 8:45 AM

	Does anyone know if this is going to be a free product or is it going to cost. I couldn't really see any hint either way except for on the Bolt page it says "We are currently targeting the commercial release for some time in 2009" commercial = £$€?
	Posted By David Boyer \| 11/19/08 8:47 AM

	So it's an "IDE", not just a plug-in?
	Posted By Joe Zack \| 11/19/08 9:13 AM

	@Joe Zack: It's confusing as to the difference. Flex Builder is an IDE, but it's also a plugin to Eclipse (Flex Builder the boxed product is a stripped down Eclipse with the plugin already installed).
	Posted By Tom Chiverton \| 11/19/08 10:16 AM

	Eclipse sucks. it's over bloated piece of java. OPEN SOURCE CF STUDIO NOW!!!
	Posted By Derek \| 11/19/08 11:14 AM

	personally I am quite disgusted adobe haven't even so much as acknowledged rob, mark and the cfe team and the hard work they have put into filling the gap adobe couldn't. Instead adobe take their idea, give it some polish Wack logo on it and pat themselves on back for how clever they are. Personally I'd go back to notepad before using bolt.
	Posted By Jason barnes \| 11/19/08 4:06 PM

	Don't forget word wrap. Eclipse and CFEclipse don't have it.
	Posted By Rob R \| 11/19/08 5:16 PM

Thanks for your feedback. Bolt will not replace the current CF IDEs out there. CF developers continue to have several options and Bolt will be another. The reason we are creating Bolt is due to popular demand to have a (and I quote *scores* of CFers) a “CF Builder similar to Flex Builder”. We researched and analyzed how we could accomplish this while delivering the best possible dev experience and CF Eclipse turned out not to be the best option b/c it’s a pure cfml editor and does not have support for html, CSS and JavaScript. Bolt is a CF IDE (and possibly also a plug-in… too early for those details yet, what we sneaked yesterday was a very early preview). We did however leverage a few things from CF Eclipse and noted our appreciation for Mark and the CFe project several times publicly at MAX this week. We also mentioned that Mark had been working with us on what will ultimately become Bolt - prior to our choice on which tech we'd base it. Mark was helpful in analyzing and assessing the options with us. You can get Mark’s take here: http://www.markdrew.co.uk/blog/. Today, about a 1/3 of the CF base uses DW, another 1/3 uses some form of eclipse and the rest are scattered btw HS and others. I expect folks to continue to chose their IDE flavor and hope that we deliver on what’s been requested by so many of you and make you more productive than ever with Bolt and Centaur.

Posted By Kristen Schofield | 11/20/08 5:57 PM

I missed the bit where you said you added a usable interface to eclipse... ;-); one that removes all the useless interface annoyances and makes it look like DW CS4... and reduces the massive java footprint...

So you're not supporting your own products... that's soooooooooo Macromedia - now it' sooooooo Adobe... when will you learn... how about a reamweaver CS4 extension... I mean how hard can it be to have someone internally create one?

Coldfusion IDE is dead. ;-) (start the blog posts)

Posted By Chris Dawes | 11/23/08 8:55 PM

	Chris - read the post I made above.. what you're saying is inaccurate and I already addressed it above.
	Posted By Kristen Schofield \| 11/23/08 9:35 PM

	Any chance Bolt will include a mac version of an RDS query builder?
	Posted By Chad \| 11/25/08 5:58 PM

Jason and Chris:
What about the very large portion of CF developers that find CFEclipse lackluster and sub-par?

Not to be insulting or take away from the I'm sure heroic efforts of MD to develop an IDE/plugin as a secondary noncommercial project, but there are a lot of people that think that it's a much better idea to start from scratch. Mark may even be one of them (I don't know). I'm definitely one of them. I've attempted to adopt a CFEclipse-only workflow various times in my ColdFusion career and always walked away disappointed or dealbroken.

Adobe made the best decision starting from scratch (or almost scratch). Once Bolt is released, and you've used it, then you can start talking.

Posted By David McGuigan | 12/4/08 9:38 PM

	@Rob R: Don't forget word wrap. Eclipse and CFEclipse don't have it. I'm running CFEclipse and under the Source menu I have a Word Wrap option that wraps the source code for easier reading. Is that what you are talking about? If it is, it works for me.
	Posted By Jennifer \| 12/5/08 10:56 AM

	David said it in much nicer words than I would have. No dis-respect to Mark but CFE is has never been up to production quality. Poor OO support, broken insight, slowest parser I've ever experienced in a ide. The decision to not use CFE or to expand upon it is a very good one. Sometimes the dinosaurs must die. To be completely honest, the only thing that makes me erie is having Marks input.
	Posted By Stewart \| 12/15/08 5:57 PM

	Will Bolt provide a foundation for both CF and Flex? Will users be able to add Bolt to Flex Builder or Flex Builder to Bolt? I hope they merge wonderful futures in dreamweaver and flex in Bolt.
	Posted By Shirak \| 3/4/09 1:16 AM