With the cut off date for the Coldfusion Builder Beta quickly aproaching, Adobe.com says it will stop working in October 2009, the big question is why switch from CFEclipse. I could go on to rehash all of CFBuilder's features and compare them against CFEclipse's, but googling that brings up many sources to get that information. Instead I would like to list some features and perks of CFBuilder that I use as a regular everyday Cold Fusion developer.

The first thing I really like about CFBuilder is its packaging (I don't mean physical packaging). You download it and install it and it just works as a CF, HTML, JS development environment. Since its a build of Eclipse, any previous projects or any plugins you currently use in Eclipse work in CFBuilder. For me the big one was our CF shops code source management plugin which if it didn't work would be an immediate reason not to use CFBuilder, luckily it did. Getting CFEclipe setup can be a pain, the last time I had to do this after a fresh install of Windows... I first installed the wrong version of Eclipse, then tried the latest version of Aptana which also didn't work, ect. So when I installed CFBuilder right out of the box and had it set up an running on all three of my machines with little hassle, this was a huge plus.

Another plus is that it can handle large CFM files well (6K+ lines of code)..Dreamweaver and CFEclipse in my experience can not. I have a application that I built some time ago that was split over a couple files that were all very large, eventually the code editor became so laggy when editing the code inline that I had to resort to coding on a seperate blank page and paste in my changes. I am sure there are some configurations I could attempt to fix this, however CFBuilder has no issues whatsoever editing these files.

One other feature I like that was present right out of the box was start and end tag highlighting, especialy with messy code and dozens of CFIF tags spread across the page. This feature comes in useful when editing someone else's legacy code. I know you can "Jump to matching tag" in CFEcipse, but I appreciate the visual indicator of CFBuilder.

Lastly I want to highlight the RDS support that ships with CFBuilder. RDS lets you browse the server and database right in CFBuilder which has become an indispensable tool to me at the moment for looking up column names and data. At the moment I can not locate a way to do this in CFEclipse, many people mention it but it looks like you now need to buy flex builder to get this plugin for eclipse, all the links they posted led me to a page saying that it was no longer available. It makes sense for Adobe to not let this feature out if they want to include it in CFBuilder.

So what will be the price of CFBuilder when its released? How will I convince my fellow CF shop developers to switch? And more importantly how will I convince my boss to purchase it for us? Only time will tell...