Which IDE is for me
An IDE is a term used to describe the main tool in a developers arsenal. The program you will spend most of your time in if your a developer. There are quite a few on the market and I’ve spent some time in quite a number. They all have there pros and cons and here is my low down on my favorites.
Coda
By far my favorite! It’s pretty basic, and in turn has forced me to learn a lot of stuff I would otherwise of had Dreamweaver making for me. Its projects view is lovely, it has a browser built in allowing you to view your changes in webkit at the click of a button (Cmd+3) and a books section allowing you to look up HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP manuals all from the IDE.
By far my favorite feature is Clips. You know all them annoying functions and bits of code you use all the time, well in Coda you can store them away and add them to you script on a trigger! Useful hey! They also have neat little plugins now that can compress your scripts and check you php is valid, so the tool is only set to get better, and at about £70 it’s a steal compared to Dreamweaver. However, if your a Linux or (disgusting) Windows user, your out of luck, because as of yet its only available for Mac.
Also, version two will be out soon, which I’m quite excited about. I can’t wait to see what Panic have in store!
Dreamweaver
We have all heard of it and probably used it, but I have to mention it. What I will say, is its great for generating some code and helping beginners start out. By having a design and code view, it allows users to see what they are coding as they do it, as well as define a number of attributes without having to delve into code.
It has some nice PHP features allowing you to generate code to connect to databases, login and register as well as generating code to input and get data out of databases. However, the code generated is chunky and a great deal of it unnecessary, you could also find yourself becoming dependent upon it. Also, I don’t know about anyone else, but I hate debugging other peoples code! Why would i want to build sites from someone else’s code, making it, my problem!
I also find it a big big and can make my RAMless computer a little slow, so I try to stick to lighter weight programs.
My advice – good for beginners and maybe helpful to some front end developers but I’d look for something else and get into good habits early on.
http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver.html
PhpED
Now this is a nice little tool for Windows users. It has, as expected syntax highlighting, the ability to jump through functions and comes up with a list of suggested functions as you type along with suggested parameters where required.
However, this tool seems to take it a step further. Once you have created a project, this tool will sift through your scripts and remember all the associated methods accessible from your current document, allowing it to auto suggest methods you might want to use! Neat hey! Defiantly worth a look for windows based PHP developers.
Eclipse
This is more for the pros. This piece of kit is free and offers some hugely useful debugging tools, although, its a heavy bit of kit, and the user interface is a little over complicated. When I’m developing, I don’t tend to use that many tools for debugging, just some var_dump’s, print_r’s, error logs and turning PHP errors on tend to do the trick, but this tool can have you step through code function by function, giving you read outs of every variable at each point. Really useful stuff if your trying to hunt down that tiny annoyance that has been bugging you for days!
Much like PhpED, this tool will sift through your scripts and remember all the associated methods accessible from your current document, allowing it to auto suggest methods. But both tools are dependent upon functions being tagged up appropriately.
Eclipse has gotten better recently, not seeming quite so heavy and cumbersome. However, I only use it when doing some particularly technical programming. For instance, its a god send when trying to remember methods and parameters in Joomla classes. I’ve not found it as useful when developing in lighter weight CMS’s however, such as WordPress. My advice, decent machine and a resident pro and you should be sorted. Or if your learning a new framework it should prove really helpful.
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
