18 Nov 08 Thoughts on Bolt

As anyone subscribing to MXNA has heard en masse today, the big news 'round the CF Circuit is the announcement of a ColdFusion "development tool" affectionately titled Bolt. (Although Adobe does has a habit of changing titles on us)

Here's what I'm on about.

1. Will it run on Linux?
This is a requirement for me. Since it's an "Eclipse based development tool" I assume it will, but I'd like to see it asserted. I don't mind paying a reasonable sum, but not if I have to wine or vm it.

2. Is it a plug-in or an IDE?
I hope by "development tool", they mean plug-in. At the time of this writing there are 1101 plug-ins listed on eclipseplugincentral.com and I'd like to be able to use any and all of them if I so choose. If I want to run Spket instead of JSEclipse, I don't want any grief about it. Also, I like having an agnostic editor. I want one IDE to rule them all. Chances are that if I have to keep eclipse around for my other languages then I'll probably going to just stick with it.

3. Bloat-i-ness?
I'm a little worried about Bolt being tacked onto eclipse along with a laundry list of exciting! new! features! that I won't use past the first week, but making for great upper-management selling points. I'm drowning in features as it is. This wouldn't be such a big deal except that I've noticed eclipse can be a memory hog. I know it's not an accurate measurement but it irritates me when I pop open the task manager on my windows box and see eclipse running well into the hundreds of megs, especially when e does most of what I want with a fraction of the memory and cpu usage.

All I really need out of an IDE is multi language and OS support, code-highlighting, snippets, RDS, auto-tabbing and intellisense. I signed up for the beta; if you can do this better than Eclipse, Adobe, I'm all yours.

Tags: bolt, coldfusion, eclipse