I am very disappointed in CFBuilder 2
thermyte Jun 1, 2011 9:13 AMI have been using CFBuilder since it first came out. I went through some of the early beta annoyances and even some of the situations where a new beta version came out and stopped the current one from working, effectively halting my production until it was fixed. That being said, I love CFBuilder and it has been a mostly positive experience. It has all of the good things about CFEclipse, with a lot of helpful enhancements.
When CFBuilder 2 came out, I was very excited to get my hands on it. I am sure I don't need to go into detail about how important a functional and feature rich IDE is to a developers day, so I am always looking forward to the latest and greatest. CFBuilder 2 falls short in so many ways and after talking many other developers, I realize that I am not the only one with that opinion. I am surprised that Adobe has produced such a bug ridden product.
Being a developer myself, I understand all to well the need to get a product released and making money, but this product is unusable and is making Adobe look bad. I talked to a number of developers at cf.Objective about this and I wasn't surprised that many of them shared my negative experience.
Because I have had issues upgrading from one version to the next in the past, it is my practice to install a fresh version, so there are less issues. I am running Windows 7, but I have talked to friends that are working on Macs and have experienced these problems as well. Here are just a few of my gripes:
- In early versions of Builder and CFEclipse as well, syntax highlighting would occasionally break and would leave your code looking like it was in notepad. Sometimes it would repair itself after time, or you just needed to type something, or highlight code and it would correct itself. In later versions this got much better and all but disappeared. In CFBuilder 2 the problem is back and worse than it ever was. The only way I could fix it much of the time was to just close the file and reopen it.
- In addition to the syntax highlighting breaking, it seems to hang much of the time. It actually crashed my editor a couple of times. Even when I set the setting to make it only refresh when you save, it still seemed to try to update anyway.
- When going to a new line, for some reason it is inserting an extra tab. I see that there is some new code formatting functionality, and I tried to change this behavior, but I couldn't find a way. This is changed behavior from how it worked before and it is frustrating having to search for options just to have it work the way it was originally. I am not really sure who would want the extra tab anyway. It is a tab that doesn't follow the flow of your regular indentation.
- The auto closing of tags doesn't seem to work properly anymore. I tried toggling the settings to see if that would help, but I wasn't able to get it working.
- The previous version gave us some really cool hotkeys. CTRL+SHIFT+A to insert an abort, CTRL+SHIFT+D to insert a cfdump, C and CTRL+SHIFT+M to wrap code in a comment. In CFB2, all of those keys have been remapped by default... I understand that the functions are still there, but it doesn't make sense to me that they were moved.
Honestly, after fighting these issues for only a very short period of time, I got frustrated, uninstalled the app and went back to CFBuilder 1. It seems like this was a complete rewrite and wasn't very well tested. I realize that I could have been a little more detailed on the explanation of some of these issues, but I really don't have anymore time to waste on this unfinished product...
I am very disappointed that this was pushed out in such a non-functional state and I won't feel comfortable giving it another chance until I start hearing that things are vastly improved.
I realize that the tone of this is somewhat negative, but it comes from hours of frustration and wasted time. I only decided to post this after I spoke with a number of my peers that are equally disappointed. I hope this can serve as a nudge to improve the quality of future releases.
Jeff