Yet Another Reason CF Needs a Quality IDE: Refactoring

I'm currently in the process of taking a relatively old application and refactoring it to support a real service layer in the model. Learning object-oriented development is a process, and my early apps were all about encapsulation and not so much about architecture. Hence, I have DAOs in one package calling gateways and other business objects in other packages, and other not-so-good coding practices. A good service layer also opens my app up to the kind of flexibility and expansion I need, especially for providing more AJAX-based client services.

Now I could just go in and do a simple find and replace for all the component or function names I'm changing, but that's rather limited. It's difficult to preview all the changes (because sometimes you may not need or want to make a specific change when you refactor), and there's no way to see this in CFEclipse/Eclipse. A good refactoring tool will go one step further and assist you when you change method signatures as well, updating method signatures in other objects as well or warning you where there's an incompatibility. Right now, I have to do all of this by hand, and it's tedious and time-consuming.

A good ColdFusion IDE with good refactoring support (for at least the two items mentioned above) would make a huge difference to me in this project. It would also give a professional level development tool to those who develop in CF. I know that there are difficulties in doing this in a a weakly-typed language, but if the Adobe team can solve this one, it would be great for the higher-end CF developers who are looking to (or moving to) other languages with widespread support for this kind of work.