Brad Melendy

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.