Semi-OT: JetBrains is likely to remove CFML support from IntelliJ IDEA

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Dave Merrill

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May 21, 2015, 1:19:59 PM5/21/15
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As some of you know, IntelliJ IDEA is a super-capable IDE, with support for a ton of languages and frameworks, including CFML up to a point. CFML, like many other languages in IDEA, is implemented as a plugin. It was originally open source, then got pulled in-house for several years, eventually lying fallow with minimal updates. It was made open source again a few years ago or so, but nobody (myself included, I'm not criticizing anyone) has stepped up to contribute, as far as I'm aware.

It still works, though there are some parsing bugs (livable IMO, in return for the general goodness of IDEA), but it hasn't been updated for the new language features of ACF 10 or later, and has never supported any Railo/Lucee-specific constructs.

None of this is news, but today I saw this:
We'll also likely remove CFML from the list of supported technologies.
- Maxim Mossienko, JetBrains, here

IMO, there's no other editor that comes close in terms of overall functionality and fluidity of the developer experience. I don't expect everyone to agree, but at minimum, it's a very credible IDE that's able to work well for CFML, HTML, Javascript, CSS, SQL, and Java, with specific support for a variety of frameworks and technologies common in the CFML world, and it'd be a shame if it went away.

I'm not a Java guy, so far, meaning that I'm not able to take this on myself, even if free time wasn't an issue, which it is. IOW, I'm being a jerk just bringing this up without stepping up, but that's what I'm doing.

I thought some of you out there would want to know, and maybe speak up in the issue tracker linked above, however much difference that'd make.

Other thoughts are welcome of course.

Andrew Dixon

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May 21, 2015, 2:16:27 PM5/21/15
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Ultimately what we need to do here is take it on as a Lucee project and change it from being a CFML plugin to being a Lucee plugin that can support both the Lucee CFML dialect (which includes both ACF and Lucee specific constructs) and the new Lucee dialect as well.

Like you I'm not the person for this but if there is someone on the list who wants to take this on then please step up and myself and I'm sure others from the Lucee members and community as a whole would do what we can to support you in that effort.

Kind regards,

Andrew

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Konstantinos Liakos

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May 21, 2015, 5:10:55 PM5/21/15
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Can't find a more complete IDE than IntelliJ. I think Lucee must officially support the plugin development.

Kai Koenig

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May 21, 2015, 5:11:56 PM5/21/15
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I’d totally agree with that, but who’d be funding something like this?

> Can't find a more complete IDE than IntelliJ. I think Lucee must officially support the plugin development.
>
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Konstantinos Liakos

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May 21, 2015, 5:25:50 PM5/21/15
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I am not sure how much effort is required for the IntelliJ plugin.

But take into account that no IDE supports the new lucee dialect now. And this is something that must be dealt with when releasing Lucee 5 stable.

If any resources are to be spent for an IDE, this should be for IntelliJ.

Kai Koenig

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May 21, 2015, 5:36:37 PM5/21/15
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I’m not sure how many people would agree with your latter statement.

I personally would, but I’d say Sublime is quite heavily used by CFML/web developers - prob more than IntelliJ users.

Regardless — it’s not the job of LAS to provide an IDE or IDE support. I think this is something that either:

- has to come from the community — in a similar way how Mark back then worked on CFEclipse
or
- has to be funded through crowdsourcing (and I would pay for something like that) or through a commercial offering by some company

But don’t expect LAS to magically come up with an IDE, they shouldn’t have to really.

Cheers
Kai

I
> I am not sure how much effort is required for the IntelliJ plugin.
>
> But take into account that no IDE supports the new lucee dialect now. And this is something that must be dealt with when releasing Lucee 5 stable.
>
> If any resources are to be spent for an IDE, this should be for IntelliJ.
>
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Konstantinos Liakos

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May 21, 2015, 5:45:52 PM5/21/15
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LAS may not typically be responsible for IDE support, but if they want the Lucee dialect to succeed and gain some popularity, at least a proper IDE is required. So their involvment is somehow required.

I would also happily pay to support a proper Lucee IDE.

Jonas Hauß

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May 21, 2015, 5:48:26 PM5/21/15
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Good news: Working on a Sublime Text 3 Lucee Syntax Highlighting right now ;)

Am 21.05.2015 23:45 schrieb "Konstantinos Liakos" <liakosko...@gmail.com>:
LAS may not typically be responsible for IDE support, but if they want the Lucee dialect to succeed and gain some popularity, at least a proper IDE is required. So their involvment is somehow required.

I would also happily pay to support a proper Lucee IDE.

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Robert Munn

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May 22, 2015, 5:20:42 AM5/22/15
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Glad you are working on updated support. So many editors in the market now support CFML in some form:

- lightweight text editors like Notepad++, Sublime, Atom, Brackets
- IDEs like Eclipse, IntelliJ
- old-school editors like emacs and vim
- etc. 

With Lucee 5 syntax is there a great possibility of supporting things like code parsing in the IDE for re-factoring, improved productivity tools, etc.? That would be an IDE worthy of support by everyone in the community - tools that go beyond what current editors/IDEs provide. Automated REST skeleton generation, code support for popular frameworks like Coldbox and FW/1. How about integration with CommandBox? It would be oh so nice to have a REPL inside the IDE, and it would also provide good hooks for live debugging, unlike the workable but brittle integration of CFBuilder with ACF. 




Robert Munn

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May 22, 2015, 7:27:09 AM5/22/15
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This discussion got me thinking about what I would like to see in a new IDE for Lucee:

Dave Merrill

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May 22, 2015, 8:19:08 AM5/22/15
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Don't know what will come of it, but yesterday the YouTrack issue for ACF 10 compatibility went from State:Submitted to In Progress, presumably off the momentum of some comments made there.

If you're among the folks who care about this, either because you use IDEA yourself, or might, or because you think its existence enriches the CFML ecosystem, I'd suggest weighing in.

Issue is here: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-110574

Dave

Sean Daniels

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May 22, 2015, 8:31:51 AM5/22/15
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Jonas, 

Are you working on adding the Lucee syntax highlighting to an existing plugin? Or something new? I would be interested in helping out, especially if you are doing it in the context of the SublimeText/ColdFusion plugin.

- Sean

Jonas Hauß

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May 22, 2015, 8:34:21 AM5/22/15
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I'started from scratch with the new sublime-syntax file extension.

Dave Merrill

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Jun 4, 2015, 9:01:13 AM6/4/15
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Folks, I see MAJOR improvements in IU-141.1383.1, the current 14.1.4 EAP, see my comment in the issue. Very exciting!

Thanks a huge amount to Maxim Mossienko of JetBrains for his work on this.


Dave

On Thursday, May 21, 2015 at 1:19:59 PM UTC-4, Dave Merrill wrote:

Andrew Dixon

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Jun 4, 2015, 12:00:12 PM6/4/15
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Thanks for the update Dave, however unless you can use this with the community edition I don't see how it is much use to most here. The paid for version is all well and good but you would be paying a very high price for something that contains a massive amount of stuff you are never going to use as well as having the fact they have already said the continued support is unlikely. So I would be shelling out a load of money with the possibility that they would then remove the only functionality I had paid to use. Also there would still be no support for the Lucee dialect and again, given their stance on continued support for CFML the chance of them adding Lucee dialect support is basically zero. 

I think as a community we need to focus on a editor / IDE everyone can actually use, so probably Sublime, Brackets or Atom, with my personal choice being Sublime, but I would be happy with either of the other two as well. My biggest issue with even trying the Lucee dialect at the moment is getting support into at least one of these editors. I have it on my very long list to look at but having never done it before I would need to learn the plugin ropes for one of these first, so if anyone else already has this experience then please take a look and report back to us on the Google Group!!! :-)

Kind regards,

Andrew

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Konstantinos Liakos

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Jun 4, 2015, 12:17:09 PM6/4/15
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What if we launched a survery to see what IDE are Lucee users currently using, and which of the three you mentioned they would like to use for Lucee dialect?

Also what will they be willing to pay for to have a fully featured and supported plugin for one of these editors.

Kai Koenig

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Jun 4, 2015, 5:07:43 PM6/4/15
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Some comments:

a) I believe it’d be feasible to remove all dependencies from commercial plugins from the CFML plugin (I think it’s only the SQL plugin that’s causing this issue), then the CFML plugin could be used with the community edition
b) Don’t underestimate how many people use IntelliJ for multiple languages. Also if Lucee truly wants to become a JVM scripting language — Eclipse and IntelliJ are where the Java/Groovy/Scala etc developers are — not Sublime. With an IntelliJ plugin you basically provide an easy way for those guys to get into a technology. Also IntelliJ has Tomcat management plugins and god-knows what else that make dev-in-JVM-land’s life easier. 

I’m not saying you should NOT support Sublime, but that by far should not be it.

Cheers
Kai


Jim Pickering

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Jun 4, 2015, 6:05:37 PM6/4/15
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First, kudos to Dave Merrill for getting this ball rolling again with JetBrains. Every bug that has been raised for ACF 11 support has been fixed and is in EAP version right now. Enough people have showed enough interest in the CFML Support in IntelliJ IDEA, that JetBrains is responding. So place your votes for this ticket to show that you want Railo/Lucee support in IntelliJ IDEA too - https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-92342

Secondly, the JetBrains engineer who is fixing the bugs for CFML support has asked for documention that clearly explains the differences between Railo 4.3/Lucee 4.5 AND ACF 8, 9, and 10. Does such documentation exist? If you would point me to that - OR - add a comment to the ticket linked above, we can help the JetBrains engineer make Lucee support happen.

And thanks again to Andrew Dixon for the Lucee IDE/Editor survey. While I voted for Adobe Brackets, myself, it certainly doesn't hurt to have ACF 10/11 and Lucee support in JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA, especially since that effort has already started, and JetBrains is currently making it happen.

Thanks

Andrew Dixon

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Jun 4, 2015, 7:01:53 PM6/4/15
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Very good point Kai, I really need to check out IntelliJ more and hope that the CFML plugin can be made available to community edition soon.

Kind regards,

Andrew

Dave Merrill

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Jun 5, 2015, 7:25:17 AM6/5/15
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I understand your concern about paying for an editor, especially if future support for CFML isn't guaranteed, however...
  • Don't know about you, but I work in my editor pretty much all day every day. I have no problem paying for a high-level tool I use that much, which improves my productivity, the quality of my code, and especially my quality of life as a developer. It's not insanely expensive either. If you haven't tried it, you really should. It's so smart.
  • Besides CFML, I also work in Javascript, CSS, HTML, SQL, and a smattering of other languages (much less), and I use several source control systems, all of which IDEA handles very well. (Well not AccuRev, but nothing does.) If things got to the point where doing CFML in IDEA wasn't viable, I'd almost certainly still use it for the languages it does support.
  • As Kai points out, the CFML plugin is only available in the paid version just for technical reasons (it's coupled to database support I think), not because they insist on charging for it. If that dependency were removed, it could be part of the Community edition. There's been some discussion of doing that, but no actual work on it AFAIK.
  • I haven't looked into this, but according the Maxim at JetBrains, adding new syntax definitions is quite easy, just edits to an XML file. Clearly some background is needed to know what to do, and to build the plugin from source to test your changes, but the process may be well within reach of some community members. If so, would put future CFML/Lucee support much more under our own control.
  • Neither Sublime nor ColdFusion Builder are free.

Nando Breiter

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Jun 5, 2015, 7:34:32 AM6/5/15
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  • I haven't looked into this, but according the Maxim at JetBrains, adding new syntax definitions is quite easy, just edits to an XML file. Clearly some background is needed to know what to do, and to build the plugin from source to test your changes, but the process may be well within reach of some community members. If so, would put future CFML/Lucee support much more under our own control.
Taking a quick look at that XML file, it seems that this might possibly be built from source in the same way that the documentation is currently being built. If that's true, then CFML/Lucee support for IDEA and perhaps WebStorm, if it uses the same plugin architecture, might be relatively simple to accomplish.

Dave Merrill

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Jun 16, 2015, 10:05:05 AM6/16/15
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Just wanted to point out that the latest IDEA EAP (1414.1531.2) has very significant improvements to handling of CFML constructs inside islands of Javascript and CSS within CFML; see IDEA-132315. The previous EAP also added support for all tags and functions that are new to CF 10.

JetBrains actually does appear to be working on some important (to me anyway) problems with its CFML support.

Paul Klinkenberg

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Jun 17, 2015, 3:15:02 AM6/17/15
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I have been using this EAP version for a while now, and it works great. I actually did not upgrade earlier from 14.0 to 14.1 because of CFML plugin issues, but now it's okay to do so.
Kind regards,
Paul

Op 16 jun. 2015, om 16:05 heeft Dave Merrill <enig...@gmail.com> het volgende geschreven:

Just wanted to point out that the latest IDEA EAP (1414.1531.2) has very significant improvements to handling of CFML constructs inside islands of Javascript and CSS within CFML; see IDEA-132315. The previous EAP also added support for all tags and functions that are new to CF 10.

JetBrains actually does appear to be working on some important (to me anyway) problems with its CFML support.

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Dave Merrill

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Jun 29, 2015, 7:11:05 AM6/29/15
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It's more than OK IMO, it's a really good thing to do, there have been a bunch of CFML parsing fixes over the past weeks. Great stuff. My far-and-away-favorite editor is a) better for CFML than it's ever been, and b) apparently being worked on by JetBrains. There are even more improvements in the IDEA 15 EAP, but there are enough plugins that aren't yet compatible that I can't go there yet.

Love it.

Dave Merrill

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Jul 11, 2015, 10:25:38 AM7/11/15
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Maxim Mossienko from JetBrains explicitly said they're interested in Lucee syntax definitions:

The xml file defines function style API from the server: name of function, number of parameters, return type, etc. It would be nice to have reasonable file for Lucee / Railo to have completion / symbol resolution. For CF11 the symbol set is done and available in IntelliJ IDEA 15 EAP builds for preview.

They've made a number of CFML fixes and improvements recently, and it'd be great if we could help them get that piece done too. By "we", I mean someone who knows the Lucee build process well, which I don't, so I'm doing the unfair thing and asking if someone else might take a look at this. It can't help but add cred to both Lucee, CFML and IDEA CFML, not to mention improve a really great (IMO of course) editor.

Dave

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