Jim Priest has written a great article on CFEclipse for IBM developerWorks entitled Code ColdFusion applications fast with the Eclipse CFEclipse plug-in.

The ColdFusion extensions released with ColdFusion 8 work on Eclipse 3.1 and Eclipse 3.2, but have known issues on Eclipse 3.3. Dean Harmon has updated the extensions so that they work with Eclipse 3.3. His update will be posted to Adobe.com at some point, but in the interests of getting it to you as quickly as possible, he's posted it on his blog. Nice work Dean, thanks!

If you are looking for the ColdFusion 8 IDE extensions (Report Builder, Dreamweaver extensions, Eclipse plug-ins, HomeSite language support) you can find them here.

Charlie Arehart has posted the mother of all lists of CFEclipse bloggers. Check it out!

Mark Drew has posted CF8 syntax dictionaries for CFEclipse, giving Eclipse awareness of and support for the CFML changes and enhancements in CF8.

As announced at cfObjective earlier today, and since blogged by Ray Camden (in real time) and others, Scorpio will feature a real interactive debugger. This is an Eclipse plug-in, so it works well with CFEclipse and Flex Builder, and provides breakpoints (with step into, step over, etc. controls), access to variables and expressions, output monitoring, and more. Debugging can be performed against local or remote servers, and multiple debug sessions (different users) can debug against the same server at once (the exact number is server configurable). If you are one of the users who lamented the loss of debugging in the move from CF5 to CFMX, we hope you'll be happy with this frequently requested ColdFusion enhancement. For those of you who were not at cfObjective, I'll be demoing the debugger at usergroup presentations starting tomorrow in Minneapolis and Chicago.

FusionDebug 2.0 is a professional debugger for use with ColdFusion MX 6 and 7. FusionDebug now installs a completely pre-configured IDE environment, including Eclipse 3.2 and CFEclipse 1.3, to help you get up and running as quickly as possible. It enables developers to control program execution by setting breakpoints, stepping into tags and CFC's, examining and modifying variables dynamically, and more.

Dean Harmon (aka. Mr. CFReport) has made CFEclipse 1.3 run on Eclipse 3.1 (which Flex Builder is based on, previously CFEclipse 1.3 required Eclipse 3.2 which is not yet supported by Flex Builder). See Dean's blog post for details.

As blogged back in June, we announced at CFUNITED that the ColdFusion team would be working with and supporting the CFEclipse project. As noted in that keynote, RDS support is the most requested CFEclipse enhancement, and today Damon Cooper blogged that this feature is indeed in the works, one way that we are contributing to this community effort.

CFEclipse 1.2 has been released. Details on the CFEclipse site.

CFUNITED started today here in Bethesda, MD. Tim Buntel and I presented the opening keynote (which has been blogged repeatedly in the past few hours).

Key points were:

• ColdFusion MX 7 is doing incredibly well (in fact, over 50% of the attendees are already using version 7, that's phenomenal).
• ColdFusion MX 7 features lots of goodies that have gone unnoticed (I enumerated several of these).
• An update to ColdFusion MX 7 (codenamed Merrimack) is in the works (in beta now), it fixes some issues, adds a real Mac OSX installer (that one get lots of spontaneous applause) as well as support for additional Linux flavors, Oracle AS, and WebSphere WAS ND, exposes CFCProxy for invoking CFCs from Java, and more.
• Following the recent Macromedia Eclipse announcement, we announced plans to work with and support the CFEclipse project.
• The next major version of ColdFusion is codenamed scorpio, and two keys areas of interest are improved presentation abstractions, and better access to server internals for profiling and troubleshooting, etc.

The best giveaway I've seen thus far are little blue M&M's with CF_EAT on them (handed out by AboutWeb). Too cool! ;-)

This morning Macromedia announced that it has joined the Eclipse Foundation. The announcement referred to Zorn, the code name for an Eclipse based tool for building Flex powered applications.

Eclipse is also of interest to parts of the ColdFusion community, and CFEclipse has a growing following. I should mention that we're actively investigating various ways of helping the CF community take advantage of Eclipse. There's no more information to offer at this stage, but we are on top of this one, and I'll share whatever I can as soon as I can do so.

CFEclipse is a CFML plug-in for Eclipse (the popular open-source Java IDE originally created by IBM, and now managed by the Eclipse Foundation). The CFEclipse plug-in provides Eclipse with CFML awareness and functionality (code completion, syntax highlighting, code insight, language help, CFC method outline viewing, code problem previewing, and more). I have been using it on and off for a few weeks now, and while it is definitely a work-in-progress, it is also very good (and surprisingly responsive). For more info visit http://cfeclipse.tigris.org/, and for a good getting -started overview visit http://www.dopefly.com/pages/cfeclipse.cfm.

This one is apparently not that new, but it was just brought to my attention, and I thought it worth sharing in case others had not run into it yet. Rohan Clan has created a basic ColdFusion Eclipse plug-in for use with Eclipse 2.1 and 3 (and apparently tested on Windows, Mac, and Linux running JRE 1.4). Details at http://www.rohanclan.com/index.cfm?mode=product&product=cfeclipse/index.