I've been using Eclipse for a couple of years now in my computer science courses. I have to say that I fell in love with the abilities of the IDE. The ability to run my ANT tasks to generate my JUnit reports and check projects in/out using both SVN and CVS from within the IDE freakin' rock!

However, my job doesn't really require a lot of Java programming. I do a lot more ColdFusion programming, so I decided to check out Spike and Rob Rohan's CFEclipse plugin.

I installed the plugin a few months ago, and I have to say that I was lukewarm to the interface at first. The code completion was nice, but I've been using Homesite+ since I started programming and I knew how to use that interface well.

This weekend I finally broke down and started reading more about how to actually use the IDE. I was immediately floored by how nice some of the more advanced features were. I absolutely love the snippet interface. The ability to create custom snippets using XML and calling that snippet from a control phrase made a lot of the repeative typing I've been doing on one of my current projects simply vanish.

No matter what Macromedia says about Dreamweaver being the IDE for ColdFusion applications, its still primarily a WYSIWYG (or wusiwyg) that has some coding features. This isn't to say that CFEclipse doesn't have some features I'd like to see, like refactoring tools (like those in the Java perspective) and SFTP abilities.