The Eclipse SDK

The past week or so, I have been diligently working with a CMS I am writing as a project, as well as trying to learn ColdFusion. ColdFusion itself is pretty easy to understand, but it is not the best language to use an editor like Notepad++ on, as it has many MANY attributes for tags and functions.

The person I have been working very closely with this on turned me onto an application called Eclipse. This base application is aimed at Java development, but with an add on called CFEclipse, it is turned into a powerful Development environment for ColdFusion.

Once I started using Eclipse, I looked around for add ons for PHP, which I found with PHP Eclipse. On top of that, I also found for Javascript and jQuery development.

After the past week or so of using Eclipse, i don't think I can ever go back to using a plain text editor, or even Notepad++, which is my old editor of choice. With all the tools at my disposal in Eclipse, it takes the burden off of developing apps.

My favorite feature of Eclipse is the fact that hovering over any function, self defined or built-in will result in a tool tip showing arguments required. It also allows you to hover over a variable and shows all instances int eh entire application that the variable exists.

Now, at the beginning of this post, I mentioned that I am writing a CMS. This is true, and in the very early stages of development. So far, user functions include session based login and logout, with a handful of other features. Once this is more mature, I will consider posting a Demo site. I have big plans for this, and Hope that it can replace Drupal for Wiredbyte some day.

The details so far include:

• This is written in PHP 5 using object Oriented programming
• Templating will be handled by the Smarty engine
• The user Interface will be Powered by jQuery, but fully degradeable to standard static HTML (blah)