Years ago, we had perhaps the best IDE on the market. ColdFusion Studio was cream of the crop. Legal issues put that one off the market when ColdFusion was in the hands of Macromedia. Adobe purchased Macromedia and has revived the IDE side of ColdFusion with the ColdFusion Builder tool. That is currently my tool of choice, but I can also point out many developers who have used and liked the DreamWeaver tool. Some are still using the open source solution CFEclipse which served the community for years. It may take some time for some of those guys to move over. ColdFusion builder will likely captured over 85 percent of the developer market who buy code tools when Adobe releases another version. There are always guys who hold back on first version products.

I will be coding between the two of them for a reason, but CF Builder will be my primary tool. There are some other tools that might be of interest to developers that assist in coding. One of them is code comparison tools. Currently, my tool is WinMerge, http://winmerge.org/. This is a free solution that treats me very well. I have used Aptana (http://www.aptana.org) for a few years, but CF Builder is so good that it will be dropping on my top tools list because it doesn't directly support ColdFusion. Watch this book's site for links and resources on CF Builder.

Another common tool used by developers is a FTP software solution. My tool of choice for years has been FTP Voyager. There are other fine FTP tools so this one is a preference more than a strong leader. Of course, my version may not be the most current one so that should be considered here.