I was browsing through Eric's "Rough Notes" on Scorpio when one item caught my eye: the new Eclipse-based cf debugger. This had been mentioned before, but carries new significance when you consider yesterday's article on Dreamweaver.
Why support Eclipse with all of these new debugging options and not your own flagship editing program?
Will these features be ported to an upgraded version of Dreamweaver when Scorpio ships? Heck, are these features already hidden away inside of Dreamweaver, and just awaiting connection to an upgraded server?
Or--and now we enter the realm of pure speculation--is this a hint that Eclipse and not Dreamweaver is destined to be the ColdFusion development environment of choice? And if so is a transition to an Eclipse-based product the real reason why the current Dreamweaver upgrade is so lackluster?
Seems unlikely, but why provide direct Eclipse support in the first place? And with a high-profile feature that everyone is going to want, and one not supported by your own product line. Because if nothing else it seems that it would shoot Dreamweaver sales in the foot.
Or are the two products destined to merge? Will Adobe, like Apple, leverage open-source software in order to build more of its products and systems? There's certainly a large community of developers out there whose work can be harnessed and extended.
I don't have any answers to many of my own questions... but the precedent is certainly fascinating.
Personally, I still maintain that we should go the other way: open source ColdFusion server, increase the developer base substantially, and then let Adobe charge per-seat for the pre-eminent ColdFusion development environment.
But that's another discussion.
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