Last week I made the switch back to CFEclipse, upon doing so I checked the lists to see what the rest of the industry is doing. This is a very active subject at the moment with people on every side of the octagon.

My take is simple, I will likely purchase CFBuilder in the calendar year give it time to settle and see how active they are going to be putting in upgrades and see the path develop more. Feature comparison is almost impossible, heck they even have the same interface and built from the same platform... Aptana / CFEclipse / ++ Comes very close to CFBuilder, the only feature that I am missing is the deep variable introspection that CFB does. Don't know about most developers but keeping your hands on the keyboard makes the money and having the IDE help complete typing your variables or functions helps not having to scroll and find where that variable was being instantiated.

Essentially for me it comes down to 3 points 1. Wanting to have that corporate structure behind the IDE - I believe this creates trust with some of our clients misguided as it may be. 2. Product standardization - ever tried to create the same CFEclipse installation with your dev team... 3. More predictable upgrade path with more resources - It won't be much but i guarantee there will be at least one upgrade a year to keep the money flowing.

Non of this is a knock against CFEclipse but rather quite the opposite, I believe in open source and have had many great years with it. I think people should stop trying to compare the products they are similar except for one major difference. CFE is nimble and can really become a very focus product built and take whatever direction it wants new blood and developer can influence where as CFB will undoubtedly stick to the Adobe formula like Flex Builder or Flash Builder.

Adobe you should give more notice and structure to your beta testing team on how products are going to released when the end date gets close. Having under 2 weeks between end of beta and shipping of product is just too tight. I was required to move back to CFEclipse as a project was just starting and switching IDE's midstream is just a waste of time. Plus i can't request purchase of software that didn't have a price most managers will look at you with a face. My two cents...