Brad Melendy

Earlier this month, Google launched App Inventor, a tool that lets non-programmers develop basic Android applications for mobile devices. The obvious implication is that it also opens the door for all the programmers out there without a working knowledge of Java to produce simple Android apps as well.

For a couple years I’ve been thinking it might be neat to try producing an app for an Android phone but didn’t have the time or inclination to tackle learning Java, the language used to develop Android applications. Like lots of programmers out there, I’ve had some exposure in college but that was long forgotten and never used as I worked as a ColdFusion programmer the last eight years. But this opens a door for me. If I get hooked creating simple apps, I’ll likely put out the extra effort to get a working knowledge of Java and take it to the next level.

I think this is exactly the sort of thing that could potentially bring lots of new developers into the Android market place. Give them a taste of what they can do with a tool like App Inventor and some will surely take the next step to produce more complex apps. Besides, you never know what a creative person might come up with. Some of the biggest success stories to come out of the mobile app market have been extremely simple tools that were more about a creative idea than complex application development.

I’ve been trying about once a year for the last 4 years to switch away from Dreamweaver to Eclipse with the CFEclipse plugin. Each time, I always ended up going back to Dreamweaver because the Eclipse/CFEclipse combination just wasn’t able to replace DW for me. Finally though, I am happy to say that I have found the right free alternative to Dreamweaver in Aptana and CFClipse.

There were really only two things I needed to replace Dreamweaver, a CFML tag editor and the concept of a remote site like Dreamweaver has. Eclipse always had spotty FTP support that I could never get working. Not until Aptana 2.x did I find a version of Eclipse that had solid FTP support and the concept of a remote site that supported “upload on save”.

I’ve been using the combination of Aptana Studio and CFEclipse for about three months now and I really don’t miss Dreamweaver at all. Occasionally I wish I had a GUI display for editing like DW has, but that is very rare. In the end I’m very happy with my switch after having used Dreamweaver in various forms from UltraDev to CS4 over the last 8 years. If you are looking for a free option, Aptana and CFEclipse might be for you.