<rant>
There are many times that I go through the bugs and enhancement requests for CFEclipse and I feel rather despondent. Why is this you ask? Well, the main reason is that CFEclipse has the wrong market, that is, its a tool written in Java that is used by a community that (on the whole) doesn’t have a lot of Java experience (I know, I know, there are many wise people out there that DO have experience, I am just talking overall). This means that there aren’t many people that can help with developing the tool.
Every so often I get a cornucopia of requests to fix something or that there is an error that is stopping them doing x or y. Most of the time I am willing to go and fix it as soon as possible, but stop for a minute and thing about something, there is currently only ONE person that is working on CFEclipse code currently, and that is in their spare time (which could be spent with a significant other be it a person or a playstation).
The reason I work on CFEclipse is that I like to add features that I need. That is how I got involved in the project. I asked Spike a while back in 2004 if he could add F1 help when you were in a tag or function, and he said “If you want it, do it yourself”. So I got tucked in, asked lots of questions, looked through the source, asked more questions, read Articles at Eclipse.org, did searches in the Eclipse Wiki and even bought some books to help me along.
Since then I have got to know more of the code, added more features, fixed bugs for people and talked about it to people and hoped people would get on board. But sometimes I think this has backfired, as people now expect to receive new versions, fixes etc as if I was a commercial supplier. I am not. Its an open source project so you CAN contribute. You can look at the source (I know that wont help to start with) but if you are running Eclipse you can even create a number of Plug-ins yourself (File -> New -> Project -> Plug-in Development -> Plug-in Project, then there are wizards for different types of project) and understand parts of the code structure for different features and extensions.
The reason for this post is when I asked for testimonials a few days back for the new website (which I thank Andy Allan for helping me out doing) I was was a bit disconcerted to get a very harsh comment back, with the words “Shame on all of you for releasing such crap software!”. Well, if the software is crap, tell me where its crap, help me make it not crap. If you have no interest in this, then don’t use it. I apreciate critisim to a point, especially if it is constructive but it felt exactly like when a client says to you “The website doesn’t work.”, err… which part?, “I dunno, it just doesn’t”.
Previous contributors to CFEclipse have left for reasons of their own (usually that they aren’t coding ColdFusion anymore) but I need this tool for my work and hence I work with it and contribute to it. If you don’t think that is a valid option, then go and buy another editor, or failing that, use notepad.
I am not saying that you shouldn’t let me know if anything is wrong, but at least have some common courtesy in the way you do it.
</rant>
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