In an understated announcement that rumbled across its 'Labs' developer portal last week, Adobe announced the public beta availability of ColdFusion Builder 2. The company appears to be suggesting that its new Eclipse-based IDE now offers ColdFusion developers a faster route to developing, testing and deploying apps as well as expanded functionality through extensions built with the CFML language.
With the market for rich Internet application (RIA) development still as fluid as it is, no single vendor has arguably taken an out and out lead, with the still-nascent technologies in this space are currently fighting for share of voice. Adobe's proposition for RIA-focused developers is to combine ColdFusion Builder 2 with ColdFusion 9 and Flash itself to access and work with tools, services and runtimes in unison.
If used effectively, ColdFusion Builder could potentially reduce development to production timescales and reduce code errors along the way. Developers are presented with an option to create a start page for their applications and then customise keyboard shortcuts, colour coding, code formatting and code snippets.
"Developers can use CFML to increase the functionality of Cold Fusion Builder 2 beta, creating extensions to generate applications, insert blocks of code and expand code assist with customised code proposals," said Adobe.
ColdFusion Builder 2 Beta also includes a smart tab assist function to navigate to the next logical tag, function, or control statement within code using keyboard shortcuts. ColdFusion Builder2 public beta is available now.
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