Have Credit Card - Want to upgrade IntelliJ Ultimate

[Dan Wilson]

I've been using IntelliJ Ultimate Edition for a number of years, primarily to work on ColdFusion and HTML/CSS/JS related projects.

As you know, the ColdFusion plugin has fallen behind in development. I'd really like to see this upgraded. I'm ready to subscribe and pay for IntelliJ Ultimate, but I'd want the plugin modernized before it would be worth the money.

As far as I understand it, IntelliJ does not have ColdFusion expertise. The ColdFusion community does not have enough IntelliJ plugin developer expertise to make much headway.

Is there something that can be done to coordinate updates to the plugin? The community would be willing to update definition files and other attributes that require ColdFusion knowledge. IntelliJ would be responsible for fixing raised bugs and merging in the new definitions.

I'd be willing to help organize the materials, should IntelliJ be able to direct a programmer to assist with the Plugin updates.

[Dave Merrill]

Great initiative and plan Dan, hope progress can be made.

+1,000,000

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[Kirill Safonov]

Hi guys,

 

I doubt if JetBrains is really tracking this forum. Seems like it’s only me to be approving new members and messages last years despite I left the company more than a year ago and just do it because I’m probably the only administrator that looks at the messages coming :)

ColdFusion user base is relatively small so no resources are allocated to develop the plugin and I don’t think this will change soon as the technology is not getting more popular (please correct me if I’m wrong).

 

The only way I can think if community would find the money to pay a developer to improve the plugin. Not sure who could be that developer though... I’m sure JB will not as they will quite reasonably assign an experienced person to the other, more “popular” topic (such as e.g. web technologies). The company is budgeted well enough so they will not be interested in any external payments.

 

> As far as I understand it, IntelliJ does not have ColdFusion expertise.

true

 

Best,

  Kirill

[Doug Hughes]

.... just throwing it out there: I'm pretty sure I could do the work, I just don't want to do it for free. 

Let's say I (very hypothetically) used indiegogo or something similar to crowd fund this. Does anyone really think anyone would donate any reasonable funds towards this?

Doug Hughes

do...@doughughes.net

651-252-4234

[Samuel Smith]

Depends on what reasonable is. I’d donate $15 bucks to it.

 

Sam

[edward.beckettx]

I don't think anyone would fund it... CF is losing market share quite rapidly ....

Edward

[Doug Hughes]

That was kinda my feeling too. 

Doug Hughes

do...@doughughes.net

651-252-4234

[Dave Merrill]

So where's the decimal point go in the cost of updating IDEA's CFML tools to ACF 11 and ideally current Railo too? For me that's the highest priority CFML task. There are other things it'd be great to have, but that's the biggie.

Re CFML market share, I work full time in the usual mix of CFML, JS, SQL, CSS, HTML, and I know others who do too. I use IDEA for all of it, and love it, out of date and slightly buggy though its CFML may be. Great IDE, miles ahead of the alternatives IMO, even for CFML.

[edward.beckettx]

Re intellij ...

Best damned IDE by far... Java, Spring, Grails, Groovy, CF, PHP, JavaScript...

IJ and Vim and I'm good to go...

[Ryan Guill]

Doug,

How much would you need to make it worth your time? Ballpark estimate of course. Would you open source it? Do you think you know how to do it well enough to lead an open source effort to develop it?

I love my intellij, I make it work for cfml even though it is far from ideal, but I would love to make it better. I think a solid foundation of syntax parsing, code coloring and intellisense for built in functions and tags would be a great start, we can always add more bells and whistles later on. I've thought about looking into other plugins (I know the dart plugin was given before as a good example) and trying to do it myself - but I would love if someone who knew how to structure the plugin properly could come along and I could just help color inside the lines.

I would certainly be willing to pitch in money towards development. I believe there is probably more people that would than you think if we can reach them.

[Doug Hughes]

Ryan,

How much would you need to make it worth your time? Ballpark estimate of course.

I'm not sure. I haven't really thought about it. Is "as much as possible" an option? The truth is this isn't a project I'm thrilled by the prospect of. A while back I cloned IntelliJ and the CFML plugin and found that it wouldn't even compile. This was due to IntelliJ API changes between major versions. JetBrains fixed this before release, obviously. But that left a bad taste in my mouth.

But, by looking at the source, I call tell that maintaining this won't be as simple as maintaining some sort of syntax definition file. It would take time to analyze how it actually works and determine how to implement new syntax features. In particular, figuring out how to segment language features across versions (CF 9,10,11, Railo, etc)

Would you open source it? 

It's already open source. I couldn't very well make my changes closed source, could I? Either way, yes.

Do you think you know how to do it well enough to lead an open source effort to develop it?

More or less, yes. I'm good at jumping into stuff like this and making it work. But, truthfully, Java can be so damned frustrating to interpret, especially in complex apps like IntelliJ. Maybe I can't do it. That's a possibility, but I'm pretty confident I can.

When it comes down to it, my opinion is that the CFML support is generally good enough. Even if there are tags and functions that it doesn't recognize, it doesn't cause the plugin to fail to work. The quirks aren't bad enough for me to switch away from it.

So, perhaps before we go any further down this road, the first question should be: Can we even get the plugin to build as-is? If so, then the next question is: Can we make any sense of the code?

If the answers to these two questions are yes, then we can explore next steps. 

Doug Hughes

do...@doughughes.net

651-252-4234

[Ryan Guill]

I see. Based on previous discussions (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/cfml-plugin-for-intellij-idea/CGSwIAehKN4/qJrWeXsuKHUJ) I was under the impression we were talking about a rewrite of the plugin, not improving the existing one.

My issues with the existing plugin is not around tags and functions that aren't recognized (I don't generally use intellisense anyway) it is around it not understanding modern cfscript syntax (such as anonymous functions) and not being able to parse the code to allow things like jumping to functions from the call in certain situations.

My vote (and monetary support) would be for a clean rewrite of the plugin to build things on a solid footing rather than trying to make the existing poor implementation work.

[Mitch McKenzie]

I evaluated the cf plugin for a few months and it wasn't terrible.  The unit testing aspect of the plugin is what caused me to go back to cfbuilder.  The mxunit pluing for cfbuilder allows me to quickly fire off unit tests in my IDE.  In intellij you had to create  a run configuration for each test cfc. I found this to be too time consuming and slowed down development significantly.  I don't know the intellij plugin api so I'm not sure I would be much help as a contributor.  I am willing to help though.  The best possible outcome would be for Adobe to update it and provide a rock solid ide with their product.  I doubt selling cfbuilder has helped their bottom line.  Perhaps companies would be more likely to choose cf if they provided a great ide that is free.  Might be too late for that unfortunately.  In my case cfbuilder doesn't do the job for a large/enterprise code base. See my comments on this blog post:  http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/coldfusion-thunder-it-s-all-new-ide#comments   (I was trying to drop an obvious hint to adobe.)

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[Doug Hughes]

Ryan,

Honestly, I just don't know that I'd be interested in a total rewrite. I imagine that what you're concerned about could be added to the existing plugin somehow. It seems to me that it's "just" a matter of parsing the additional syntax. But, truthfully, I don't know. 

I do still think it's worth trying to get the current plugin to compile. If we can, then it could be explored a bit to determine it's quality and learn it's structure. If it's trash, then we consider trashing it and starting from scratch. At least thinking about the architecture for a new or updating plugin is a good exercise to go through. 

I do think there's a really good chance that any CF plugin might be abandoned in the future. A lot of people who might have the ability to maintain it (like me) are slowly migrating out of the CF world and IntelliJ isn't a widely used IDE for CF devs. But, who knows, maybe I'm wrong.

Doug Hughes

do...@doughughes.net

651-252-4234

[Cameron Childress]

On Sat, Nov 8, 2014 at 7:15 AM, Doug Hughes wrote:

I do think there's a really good chance that any CF plugin might be abandoned in the future. A lot of people who might have the ability to maintain it (like me) are slowly migrating out of the CF world and IntelliJ isn't a widely used IDE for CF devs. But, who knows, maybe I'm wrong.

I think this is the real problem. The community is shrinking and many who are the most knowledgable are working with other technologies now. 

I don't know that I could figure out how to update the plugin myself and even if I did figure it out I don't think I would have the time to do the work required - and I am someone still doing a good bit of CF work. The rock stars in the CF world who could get this going with little effort are fewer and farther between now. 

If someone more knowledgable is going to spend some time on this at all - I think that time may be better spent documenting and educating about how to do work on the Plugin rather than working on the plugin directly. If this plugin finds a nice tidy home on GitHub with a wiki full of "how to" articles about how to set up, develop against, and compile the plugin - it may help those of us with less time or ability contribute more.

Just my two cents. I don't use IntelliJ anymore but still watch the list and monitor the plugin's future. I would consider using it again if it smelled like progress was happening on the plugin.

-Cameron 

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Cameron Childress
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[Dave Merrill]

From where I sit, it's not that clear that CF work and devs are drying up. Yes, there's a ton happening on the front end, and most CF folks (need to) do the full stack not just CFML (I always did), but that's not the same as the CFML Is Dying thing. Neither is that fact that IntelliJ has made the not unreasonable decision to put their efforts into platforms that are more in their wheelhouse and/or more mass-market.

Rumors/statistics about the demise of CFML have been around for a really long time.

That said, Cameron's point about collecting and publicizing the info needed to work on the plugin is well taken.

[Cameron Childress]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 12:13 PM, Dave Merrill wrote:

From where I sit, it's not that clear that CF work and devs are drying up. 

I certainly don't want to turn this into one of THOSE threads. I still primarily make a living off writing CF code too. There is still a ton of stuff out there and it's not just legacy stuff. We launched several brand new substantial sized business apps on CFML this year.

But hard to deny it's shrinking. Shrinking simply means getting smaller, not going away tomorrow. Is it 1% less? 10% less? Absolute numbers or market share? I don't know. When does it get to zero? Will it ever get to zero? I don't know.

But - it doesn't matter.

This is not a thing to be scared of. It's happening in slow motion. If you have CF work to do - awesome! If you need to add a new language to your toolbelt - awesome. You have plenty of time. This happening in slow motion and not worth loosing any sleep over.

In the meantime, it doesn't matter if I am right or wrong, either way there is plenty of runway left to get the Plugin ship shape and for some people to really get quite a bit of good use out of it. 

My original point was: Give a programmer a plugin and you feed him for a day, teach a programmer to write the plugin and you feed him for a lifetime. Or something like that...

-Cameron

[Dave Merrill]

(:-)