Adobe Launches ColdFusion Builder 2 Beta

Adobe Systems delivers a beta release of the ColdFusion 2 integrated development environment for creating ColdFusion applications.

Adobe Systems has announced the beta release of Adobe ColdFusion Builder 2, a new version of the popular development environment for building ColdFusion apps.

Using ColdFusion Builder 2 beta, users can develop, test, and deploy applications in less time, customize their work environment to improve workflow, and expand functionality with extensions built with ColdFusion markup Language (CFML). When combined with Adobe ColdFusion 9 and the Adobe Flash Platform, developers can utilize a comprehensive set of tools, services and runtimes, for creating rich Internet applications.

ColdFusion Builder is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) for rapidly developing ColdFusion applications. The new beta release provides professional coding tools, server management, testing tools, and new deployment capabilities, enabling developers to quickly and easily move from development to production with less code and fewer errors, Adobe said in a press release on the new version of the product. It also allows developers to create a start page for their applications and customize keyboard shortcuts, color coding, code formatting and code snippets, speeding up the development process. Developers can use CFML to increase the functionality of ColdFusion Builder 2 beta, creating extensions to generate applications, insert blocks of code, and expand code assist with customized code proposals.

"The ColdFusion Builder 2 beta enables users to take control of their development environment, said Anup Murarka, director of product marketing at Adobe, in a statement. With this release we've introduced new functionality that significantly speeds the development of applications and accelerates projects, saving time and money."

Meanwhile, Brian Klaas, senior Web systems developer at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology, said, "The expanded capabilities of extensions in Adobe ColdFusion Builder 2 allow us to easily create custom extensions to the ColdFusion Builder workspace. The ability to create a new view in Eclipse with a single line of code in a ColdFusion Builder extension is a stroke of genius and opens up all sorts of possibilities for our development work."

ColdFusion Builder 2 includes such features as smart tab assist, which enables developers to quickly navigate to the next logical tag, function, or control statement within your code using keyboard shortcuts. Another key feature is the quick fix capability, which helps speed up development by accessing methods within a ColdFusion Component (CFC) that have not yet been created, and request that ColdFusion Builder automatically generate the method outline. The new release also includes integrated task management to enable developer to set "to do" and "fix me" points within the code to quickly identify sections and resume development where developers left off.

Dave Brioux, CEO of ForInsite, said, "Overall, the wealth of new features in Adobe ColdFusion Builder 2, including the professional coding and testing tools, significantly advance coding practices - helping me code at least 35 percent faster and accelerate product development to save time and money."

Other key new features in the ColdFusion 2 beta for developers to test include customizable keyboard shortcuts for creating customized keyboard shortcuts, modify existing shortcuts, and import/export keyboard bindings to access frequent actions in the IDE. Intelligent Code Assist accelerates application development with intelligent, ordered code assist for CFML, CFScript, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. And refactoring support speeds up CFML application development by automatically restructuring code when renaming a CFC, function, or variable, Adobe said.