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CFEclipse: A Community Affair : An Interview with Simeon Bateman, Project Manager

By Judith Dinowitz

One of the big announcements at this year's CFUNITED conference was the official word of support from Macromedia for the CFEclipse IDE. But what is CFEclipse and why is Macromedia now openly supporting it? To give our readers more of an idea, we interviewed Simeon Bateman, project manager of the CFEclipse project, at CFUNITED.

Simeon's enthusiasm for CFEclipse was evident from the start of our interview. He first began using it a few months before CFUN-04, when he was looking for a good IDE for CF after switching from Windows to Linux. Over time, Simeon became an active user and evangelist, and is now the Project Manager for the project.

CFEclipse is built as a plug-in for the open-source Eclipse IDE, a Java application that allows for expansions and extensions. The project began in 2004, when Rob Rohan, the "father" of CFEclipse, developed most of the formal concepts behind the IDE. He started making releases available to the public as the project evolved. Soon, he was joined by other developers, such as Oliver Tupman and Spike Mulligan, who made major contributions to the development of CFEclipse. The leadership of the project passed from Rob Rohan to Oliver Tupman, and finally to Spike Mulligan, who continues to lead the project today.

What makes CFEclipse a good IDE for ColdFusion developers? Simeon said that ColdFusion developers don't only develop in ColdFusion. "We often wear many hats," said Simeon. "Most IDE's allow us to develop for multiple technologies like ColdFusion, HTML, CSS, and JS, which may account for a large portion of CF developers. However, as CF matures, so do the techniques we use to get our jobs done. As such, more users are looking to Java for solutions that are beyond the scope of traditional ColdFusion. Also, developers are using more tools, such as ANT and subversion, to aid them in getting their jobs done quickly. The extensibility of the Eclipse platform allows you to have tools for all your development, and it can be integrated into one IDE."

Macromedia recently approached the CFEclipse project leaders to discuss if/how they could aid the CFEclipse team. "I try to be very unassuming when I speak with Macromedia," said Simeon. He views the announcement of support as a first step, and hopes it will help in getting the word about CFEclipse out to the larger ColdFusion community. "I'm very happy to hear that Macromedia is not against the project. It would significantly hamper our adoption in the community."

Until now, adoption has been slow because there was no real home for the project. There was no way of tracking how many people downloaded the Bleeding Edge releases (otherwise known as the "beer" releases). The BER releases have been available on Spike's personal site. "I have heard him say that we receive about 300 downloads of the release within the first few days," said Simeon. At CFUNITED, Simeon announced the new CFEclipse website (http://www.cfeclipse.org) and the CFEclipse mailing list on that site. The current build, version 1.2.0, was released on August 14th.

When Simeon asked at the conference who used CFEclipse, about a third of the audience raised their hands, a more significant number than he had previously thought.

Now that Dreamweaver 8 is out, I asked Simeon to compare the two IDE's. He said, "Dreamweaver 8 is an excellent visual editor. The advances they made in building CSS layouts are amazing. They even added some features that we have enjoyed in CFEclipse for quite a while, such as the ability to collapse a segment of code." He noted that Dreamweaver has a strong WYSIWYG interface and appeals to the visual development crowd (whom CFEclipse will probably never focus on). "If you are focused on code," he said, "CFEclipse will help you get your job done faster and better."

Simeon said that CFEclipse may take the place of ColdFusion Studio and Homesite for many developers, but the appeal of CFEclipse was broader than current Studio and HomeSite users. "I think that labeling that as our market really limits the scope of what we have available to us," he said. "There is a new breed of ColdFusion developer emerging and they are the ones who are really jumping on the CFEclipse bandwagon. As CF developers evolve, we tend to more and more make our development practices mimic those of Java developers. Tools like Ant and Subversion (which make the job of a Java developer easier) are built into the Eclipse IDE and are very easy to build into our CF development workflow."

What does Simeon expect from Macromedia? One possibility is free software for the use of the CFEclipse team, and Macromedia's help in serving up a better version of Eclipse for ColdFusion developers. "One of the best things Macromedia has to offer us is their experience with CF developers," said Simeon. "They went onsite with hundreds of developers over the course of their development of the current version of ColdFusion. Their guidance as we move forward on this could be huge. Their knowledge is something I know I can count on."

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