Joe’s Blog

So recently I had an unfortunate incident with my work laptop that has forced me to go through the process of setting up a new laptop again and reassembling my empire of software development tools. I’m an avid user and fan of Adobe’s Homesite product line (even though it has more or less been discontinued), but I’ve felt the pressure to jump on the Eclipse bandwagon for a long time. In attempt to make a lemon juice out of lost laptop…err…lemonade, I’ve been using Eclipse for the last couple of days to see how it stacks up. Here are a few thoughts for anyone looking at making the same kind of jump jump.

Setting Up Eclipse

You can download eclipse here (big download, but worth it). Once you have it you can view the information on how to get CFEclipse here. In short, all you need to do is go to Help > Software Updates > Find and Install > Search for new features to install > New Remote Site and add this URL: http://www.cfeclipse.org/update. Then you’ll need to click next a few times in order to download and install the CFEclipse perspective.

Since the work I do isn’t really project oriented I just made one project at the main document root after I’d created a Workspace. At this point I was ready to start editing. Well, almost. My old habits die hard so I’ll have to fix a couple of things before I can become an eclipse power user.

1. Since I always close quotes, double quotes, and tags on my own the editor’s default auto-close feature turns into a real code breaker. You can turn this off under Window > Preferences > CFEclipse > Auto-insertion and closing.
2. Under Window > Preferences > CFEclipse > Editor you can turn on line numbers

Things that make me miss Homesite

Having now used CFEclipse for a few days I’ve come up with a list of the things that I really miss from Homesite.

1. The indent buttons. Very useful in the rare event I wanted to make my code readable by formatting it.
2. Word wrap.
3. New Tag Dialogs. While I haven’t used them regularly for a long time it sure is nice when you are hunting for an obscure attribute or trying to figure out what is required to get a particular tag up and running.
4. The Non-Breaking-Space-Button. I believe the characters required to insert a non-breaking-space were specifically designed to be un-typeable in a quick and orderly fashion. I really want a button!
5. TopStyle. The css editor that comes with Homesite. I never used it extensively (anyone who looks at my CSS files knows that) but it sure was helpful as a reference and for making quick updates.
6. No Double click support. I can’t click on a file in Windows Explorer and have it launch in Eclipse in an editable fashion. This problem alone kept me from making the jump the last two times I’ve download Eclipse.
7. No File Drag Support. In Homesite you can download a file to your desktop and then drag it into your Homesite file explorer. No such luck with CFEclipse.

Things I like about Eclipse

1. Context Help. Better, more current, faster, and more complete than anything Homesite has to offer.
2. Quick buttons to surround selection in CFDUMP/# signs/CFML comment tags/etc.
3. Actively supported by a community. Homesite is closed source and not a high priority for Adobe and is never likely to become one.
4. Free! What can I say? Eclipse is probably the best and most thought out editing platform out there…that you don’t have to pay for. Not that it is perfect, but with some many languages and such a large community it is hard to find a reason not to use it. This is doubly true if you use any kind of alternative or open source language to do your development in.
5. FTP connections. Probably the single most time saving feature of Homesite when building Joe’s Goals was the FTP connection feature. Fortunately Eclipse has the same type of feature under File Explorer View > FTP Connections. It is a little buggy but a worthy substitute.

Conclusion

Eclipse is a worthy successor and the reasons to use it (especially as I look at learning and using other languages) are overpowering. No editor can possibly contain all the features one would want, but Eclipse comes close. That said, I’m sure I may find occasion to load up Homesite every now and again and will continue to use it at home.

Thanks to Ryan Stewart for helping me get up and going with Eclipse and Sign Generator for the cool picture. Let me know if you come across any tip or tool that makes CFEclipse dramatically better for this lowely ColdFusion developer.