You may have heard about this on the latest ColdFusion Weekly Podcast (I actually found this on dzone), but Aptana is a new IDE based on Eclipse that offers code assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. The CSS code assist alone is huge to me since I have not found a decent CSS editor for Eclipse up to now. The code assist will even let you know the compatibility (Firefox/IE) of the attribute. I am just beginning to test this out, but for the moment it seems like an excellent compliment to CFEclipse.

Initially I had some trouble locating the download (and the instructions on the wiki didn't actually install the plugin (and I already had the most recent CFEclipse version). Finally Ray Camden directed me to actually click to download the Flex 2 Builder 2 and then look for the "Download ColdFusion Extensions to Flex Builder 2.0 (ZIP, 1.8 MB)" link. (not the most obvious place to me, so thanks Ray). After downloading the zip, and placing the four plugin folders in my plugins directory, I loaded up Eclipse and there in my preferences was the RDS configuration. The setup here is fairly straightforward, and I was able to get an RDS connection to our development server at Hasbro working in no time. I opened the RDS dataview view and saw my database tables. Right click on a table and you can run the query viewer to test queries against your database, or run the ColdFusion wizards to auto-generate CFC's based upon your database table (your bean and your DAO, with several different options). These features are extremely useful even if you are not using Flex. The RDS fileview is pretty straghtforward, so no need to expand on that. Basically, this is really, really sweet, and IMHO was the missing link in CFEclipse (now if I could only find a decent CSS plugin...anyone?)

I have been using CFEclipse for quite some time now, probably close to a year at this point. Alot has happened over that time and I have added (too) many plugins and upgrades, many of which I never actually used on a consistent basis. Some things seemed not to work properly on my Eclipse installation, and, anyway, it was feeling unnecessarily bloated. With that in mind, I started a cleanup of my installation and have moved to a more bare essentials plugin installation to make things easier to maintain. I thought it might be useful to cover my setup and also cover the the plugins I have used in the past.

Sourceforge has launched an Eclipse focused site at eclipse.techforge.com. They are saying this is the first in a series of "TechForge vertical channel strategy" designed to "provide IT professionals and developers with in-depth resources and information about specific vertical technologies." In non-marketing speak this means that they have news and articles related to Eclipse as well as links to downloadable projects related to Eclipse (i.e. plugins). Took me a while to connect to it, but it looks "bookmark-worthy".

Recently I upgraded my Eclipse installation to the Stable Build 3.1 M7 and ever since I have been getting errors when I work on certain folders on a mapped drive. The error occurs when I edit a file in the particular folder and save it. Afterwards, if I try to save it again, I get the following error:

Shannon Hicks reported exactly the same issue to me, so I am not alone. I would rather not revert to the older installation (this install is much faster), but it making work difficult (I need to keep closing and reopening the file after every save).

Has anyone else encountered this? If so, have you found a solution?