The release of Dreamweaver CC brought some important enhancements to the product, along with a renewed focus on client-side development and technologies. To support that focus the Dreamweaver team made a decision to deemphasize other areas of functionality. And among the removed features is some of Dreamweaver’s ColdFusion support. This has upset many in the ColdFusion community, and understandable so. But, as usually happens, facts and realities get misconstrued amidst the angst and hand-wringing. And so this is a chance to try to set the record straight.
It is true, the Dreamweaver team has significantly reduced support for ASP/ASP.NET, JSP, and CF. That was a business decision. Every product team has to do what they think is in the best interests of their product. The ColdFusion team has to do what they think is best for the ColdFusion business, and that includes a CF10, a planned CF11, an upcoming conference, and, yes, ColdFusion Builder. Likewise, the Dreamweaver team has to focus on what’s important for them and their numbers, and their client-side focus makes sense to them (and, actually, to me, too). Would I like Dreamweaver to do it all? Sure, but that’s not practical, and so they made the trade-off’s and decisions that ever Product Manager has to make. And personally, I like the Dreamweaver focus, it’s long overdue. Do you know that DW6 still had dialog boxes with Netscape Navigator icons in it? Seriously, Dreamweaver was suffering from ongoing feature addition while nothing was ever deprecated or removed. As I said, this was overdue.
And so, yes, Dreamweaver now has less ColdFusion support. But, to be brutally honestly, I had given up on Dreamweaver support for ColdFusion a long time ago because Dreamweaver has never been a true ColdFusion IDE. Even back in Allaire days when I worked with the then Macromedia Dreamweaver team to add ColdFusion support, the support was minimal at best. There was one release (MX maybe?) that added some decent CFC support, but honestly, there has been no real Dreamweaver support for ColdFusion since then, just more of the same. And over the years that has frustrated me far more than Dreamweaver CC reducing ColdFusion support does. And so, recognizing Dreamweaver for what it was, the ColdFusion team opted to build ColdFusion Builder, and that’s where they are putting their efforts. I understand that many don’t like ColdFusion Builder, I’m not a major Eclipse fan myself, but ColdFusion Builder is a far better CFML IDE than Dreamweaver ever was, and so that’s the focus going forward. And there are other alternatives, too. In fact, even Brackets now has a work-in-progress community based CFML extension.