A recent thread on CF-Talk asked if anyone had documentation for the RDS protocol, or if anyone had tried to crack it. RDS works over http, so its possible to just use a protocol analizer to capture the communication between CF Studio, or Dreamweaver and the ColdFusion server. While that is possible, the best solution would be for Macromedia to simply document how it works. I suggest that you send in a request to the ColdFusion wish form
I use RDS a lot, and you can use it securly if you use it over SSL. I would like to be able to connect to RDS from a Linux desktop, as well as from other IDE's such as JEdit, and Eclipse.