We recently got some new PCs in work and that has forced me to re-examine my entire workflow for doing development.  I thought I'd share some of the findings and pitfalls I've encountered along the way in the interest of helping others get setup efficiently.  The tale begins many years ago...

I can remember the early days of Hotdog Pro, and then falling for Nick Bradbury's editor named Homesite (which was acquired by Allaire way back in 1996).  Homesite was made even better one Allaire integrated things like RDS, allowing us to work easier with files on the server.  But that was always a risky proposition because Internet connections were not too great and if your connection quit while saving the file back to the server, you could end up with lost code and no backup.  Allaire ended up beefing up Homesite and releasing a version as ColdFusion Studio which had integrated debugging and some other CF-specific features.

Fast forward to the Macromedia acuisition and Dreamweaver comes on the scene - taking things up a notch and allowing for better project management.  It is now possible to edit my files locally and have them automatically transfer to the server on save, freeing me from the worry of bad Internet connections.  But still not a perfect world..  Dreamweaver is slow (not to mention expensive).  As a die-hard hand coder, the visual design features of Dreamweaver never really appealed to me, and I ended up with a bulky editor but one that gave me some critical features for working on and managing projects.

As a side note, for those who are wondering what ever happened to CF Studio?  With the release of Dreamweaver MX and the Studio MX suite, Macromedia felt it was confusing to also have a CF Sudio in the product line.  Since CF Studio was really only a souped-up version of Homesite, that name was killed and we were left with Homesite+, and the program was (and is) made available on the Dreamweaver and Studio CDs.  They also felt it unnecessary to continue with both products and froze development of Homesite+, though tag libraries are still made available for newer versions of ColdFusion.

So where do we go from here?  What about source control?  Ahh...  CFEclipse to the rescue...  In an upcoming post, I'll go over my new setup and explain how you can get all of the tools you need for a great development environment - and all at a cost of $0!