That’s a good point, I didn’t think of that. Right now it feels like you’re hooking into a server to get the job done when you could just be running in a local context to accomplish the same thing. Netbeans accomplishes this by using Ruby and WebBrick together, I wonder if something as simple as that could help to solve the problem? Maybe a Jetty instance with Adobe’s app server attached that could be started in a local context w/o dependency on a remote app server? Maybe even just a cfcompiler and some type of webserver emulator tied into CFEClipse so that the server isn’t even needed?

CF8 has the debugging features you’re looking, CFEclipse has the cfc/cfUnit runner in Eclipse for us, but it feels like a chore to do setup. They made it as easy as possible and it still doesn’t feel like I can be as productive as I want like I can when working with Java or .NET.

Correct me if I am wrong, but coldfusion is essentially implemented through a servlet. If they were to make this implementation using JSR, the language would be so much less restrained. For instance you wouldn’t need a server running to unit test or debug you code. Could you imagine cfdebug, and cfcUnit or even cfcBehave in a nice eclipse runner like jUnit, or even better be able to set break points in your cfcs and step through the execution.

I remember hearing somewhere that Adobe didn’t feel it was necessary to impleent becasue about 2% of the community uses coldfusion in a way it would be helpful. But I believe with coldspring, and transfer, more and more people are moving from the procedural coldfusion into the object oriented coldfusion. And the closer to the JVM the language gets, the better the tools for working with the language will get.