Adobe Announces That HomeSite Is Officially Dead
Posted July 3, 2009 at 9:56 AM by Ben Nadel
With the exception of new ColdFusion tag definitions, we all know that there hasn't been any active development on HomeSite in a long time. Dreamweaver, CFEclipse, and now Adobe Bolt have long since taken over that product path. But still, it made me a bit sad to find out earlier this week on Twitter that Adobe officially announced the death of HomeSite as a product as of May 26, 2009, not only in development but also in sales and distribution.
It was and continues to be a quality product that aided many of us in our ColdFusion development efforts. With a superior directory and file tree navigation, large regular expression based extended find and replace box, and many other fantastic features, it leaves very large shoes to fill. You will be missed!
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Reader Comments
About time. Despite learning on HomeSite and preferring it for a long time until Dreamweaver got its act together, it has been a long overdue retirement.
I would love to see Adobe come out with a Dreamweaver Light, though.
@Bret,
I think we're all hedging out bets on BOLT for a brighter future. So far, it looks pretty cool
I am eagerly waiting! I use Dreamweaver mainly, but only use 10% of the functionality...not a drag and dropper. :)
I also use Eclipse. I like it, but I hope they make Bolt less of a PITA than Ganymede. Of course my Mac friends tell me to shutup and switch to a Mac to start using TextMate.
@Bret,
Yeah, I also found Dreamweaver to have so much functionality that I didn't use. I found it to be very slow and cumbersome.
If Adobe do as good a job with Bolt as they did with Flex Builder (and I'm talking about code completion - not sure how practical this is with an interpreted language!) it will really help keep/attract developers. I use CF Eclipse and it beats anything else out now - but still leaves me frustrated sometimes.
Oh and I hope they price it sensibly too! :)
Noooooooooooooo!!
I mean... Shoot. I still haven't been moved from Homesite+ 5.5. I didn't like Dreamweaver, and I missed too much when I was using Eclipse. I always knew in the back of my mind it was dead, but I still love it so.
I really, really hope Bolt is all it's cracked up to be. I've always been looking for something to replace Homesite, cause I know it's dated. But so far nothing else really works well with me, after I've customized it as far s it can be customized.
Though, I will say I'm glad Adobe didn't leave their CF crowd out in the cold, and just say "They'll just use Dreamweaver now".
@Tim,
I'm in the same boat. I still use HomeSite as well. But, I think the new editors represent not just a shift in the product, but also in the development environment and setup. We are shifting from a file-based mindset into a project-based mindset. From what wiser people tell me, this is the way of the future. I just hope I can get on board.
Homesite will live on in our hearts. :)
I still think it's the best code editor ever. I don't really care for DW or CFEcplipse - bolt shows some good promise. HS help system was the best and mine is heavily customized.
It'd be nice if they open-sourced HS. I'm sure someone could do some nice things with it. No point in putting something out to pasture that people still actively develop in.
I'm with Mark and Tim: still the best IDE for CF, especially for those of us with years of customization which can so easily be moved from machine to machine. I just have trouble making the Eclipse leap for easy snippets and easy find & replace. Guess it's time to really give Bolt a run, eh?
Ben: Do you find Eclipse's find/replace functionality lacking? It also supports RegEx find/replace, and as of Ganymede also has improved search results output.
Just a thought that I noted since you specifically mentioned find/replace.
Josh
I used CFEclipse/Aptana for about six months and the returned to Homesite+, because FTP was too buggy in CFEclipse as well as Aptana.
I can only hope that Bolt will have decent FTP support.
@Joshua,
I really enjoyed the large textarea-like boxes that HomeSite used for the find/replace. One of the first things I really started using find/replace for was data cleaning (ie. standardizing values in massive Excel documents that were literally hundreds of pages long). As such, the very large, very user-friendly find/replace boxes were essential to the work.
It became a luxury that I just got used to. The last time I checked, all Eclipse-based editors had small, unfriendly find/replace boxes more like input boxes, not textareas. Sure, that's really fine for a lot of stuff, but when it comes to hard-core data cleaning, I find it to be non-usable.
@Ben,
Completely agree. I know that the search has gotten better in Eclipse, but the first few times I used CFEclipse that one feature kept bringing me back to Homesite. Particularly when I learned to do complex regex searches in Homesite's find feature.
@Jason,
Yeah, I pretty much learned regular expressions uses HomeSite's Find/Replace feature :)
Two words for Adobe. OPEN SOURCE!
Nooooo...,
Well, I still use it especially because it's built-in regex search and replace withour having to write a regex ;-)
And it's simple, not so clunky as CFEclipse and als its plugins.
Have taken a first look at FlexBuilder 4, and it entails a whole new way of working with an IDE for me. So now I guess I'm being forced into it ;-)
First the King of Pop, now this... I feel I must say a few words...
@Homesite,
I remember the good ole days with you. You always colored my CFML so nicely, and helped me to find/replace with ease. You were the reason I never WYSIWYG'ed.
Through your code completion I learned many things. You were always ready to help me pick just the right function, or property...
You're split pane folder/file navigation was amazing.
You always let me customize you with ease... All my custom tags had wizards because of you.
Of course there was that time I played around with CF Studio, but always found my way back to you. It wasn't until DW UltraDev came out that I started to neglect you. Oh if I could reverse time...
Though we didn't spend much time together these past few years, you still held a piece of my heart. You will be missed. I hope you have passed on all your wisdom and experience to Bolt (not the animated super-dog, but the IDE).
May you live on my c drive forevermore.
@Abram,
Well said... well said.
So is flash paper.
