Upgrading My Development Environment

I admit it; I have been behind the times for a while. Most of my ColdFusion development has been on HomeSite and I haven't been much using source control. I started using CFEclipse a few months ago, but I would still switch back to HomeSite with some frequency. I decided, however, that it is time for a change.

CFEclipse

Although I have been using CFEclipse for some time now, it has never really worked for me very well. It is a good editor, but some of the features that I have seen discussed don't work for me. I suspect that I have a bad install or version conflict somewhere. So, I do a fresh install of Eclipse 3.3 Europa. Then I install CFEclipse 1.3 on top of that. This gives me just the features I was looking for (tag editing, specifically).

Aptana

Unfortunately, it now opens up CSS and JavaScript files in TopStyle or Dreamweaver. I would rather stay in Eclipse. I had been planning to try out Aptana anyway, so this seems a perfect opportunity. By now, I am getting used to the Eclipse manner of adding new programs and this goes smoothly. I can now edit CSS and JavaScript files from within Eclipse and Aptana provides some nice code hinting. I'm sure it can do more than that, but I haven't gotten that far with it yet.

Subversion/TortoiseSVN

Next up is source control. I install TortoiseSVN without any trouble. My friend Jason Holden walks me through connecting to a repository with it. Peter Farrell had mentioned CVSDude as a good option for hosting subversion repositories during his presentation on source control to our group. With Jason's help, I find the right plan (for me: "Team") and sign up.

Although my account is approved almost immediately, I am unable to create repositories until the next day (I signed up at the end of a work day). On my first repository, I do an import as my first action and that seems to mess things up, so I have to destroy and recreate. After that, I set up the connection to the repository then checkout and then his "Add" and all is well.

TortoiseSVN works very well and is intuitive. It would be nice, however, to access my repository directly from Eclipse. I remember Jason telling me that he uses Subclipse. I try to install subclipse but get an integration error, so I uncheck some of the integration options and that resolves the error. I haven't doe much with this yet, but I am looking forward to playing with it.

Other Tools

I have been using a few other good tools for my development as well. Instead of listing out other good tools here, I recommend that you take a look at The Ultimate ColdFusion Tools List.

After just a week, the time spent upgrading my development environment has already paid off. I am now fully committed to Eclipse and source control (and addicted to snippets - more on that later). Life is good!