What Tools Do ColdFusion Developers Use?

When learning a new language, many developers consider the availability and quality of development tools at their disposal before fully committing to using that language. It's a perfectly viable reason to decide whether or not you want to fully embrace a technology. Imagine you bought the finest European sports car on the planet. It drives beautifully and looks stunning - but when it's time for an oil change you have to buy a specific wrench from Malaysia that costs $750 and works only one time. OK, so that analogy is a bit dramatic, but the association between our chosen platform and our tools is an important one. If we despise working with the tools we have at our disposal then naturally we'll be less excited to work on code that uses those tools.

There are a number of fantastic tools ColdFusion developers have and use on a daily basis. Code Generators, IDEs, frameworks, open source applications like bug trackers, debugging and monitoring tools - the list goes on and on. Many of these tools are built with ColdFusion while others are built on different technologies (like CFEclipse, the popular ColdFusion IDE built on the even more popular Eclipse platform).

To do such a list justice would be incredibly time consuming and would be out of the scope of an article such as this. Luckily a highly respected and accomplished member of our community has compiled one for us. If you'd like to see the impressively comprehensive list of developer tools, check out Tools to Consider for CFML developers which was created and is maintained by Charlie Arehart. Charlie is a long time contributor to the ColdFusion community who blogs regularly and maintains many resources such as this for the ColdFusion community. Check out a list of his lists here.