Eclipse might be awesome, but I wouldn't know.
So, I decided to switch to Eclipse from Dreamweaver for web dev. It seemed logical. Eclipse is free and well-supported and has a large number of people developing plugins and projects for it. Dreamweaver is expensive, buggy, and bloated, and it doesn't integrate shit.
I should theoretically be able to use Eclipse to edit and debug and test PHP, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, and .net and JSP if it ever comes to that. Furthermore, it has SVN and database integration.
Well, it turns out that developing for Eclipse somehow means you have to make everything obtuse and obfuscated for the end users. I just spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to get Eclipse to connect to my database. Actually, it was spent trying to figure out how to get eclipse to recognize the JDBC driver I downloaded for it. It turns out that you can't remotely access a Yahoo! Small Business database externally anyway, but that's a completely different problem.
I haven't even tried to figure out how project management works on the thing. I do know that I can't simply point it at a local copy of a web site and start working. I did download what looked to be helpful PDF files from IBM developer works, but for some reason, their guide to developing in PHP on Eclipse starts with connecting to an Apache Derby database (their directions for that don't work, either) and setting up Tomcat and then goes into a very involved discussion of how to build a Java application to access that DB and run it in Tomcat.
Who the fuck goes to IBM for their documentation anyway. This is the company who put out the manual for DOS 3.3 on loose-leaf in a canvas-covered 3 ring binder.
The following blog echoes a lot of my sentiment. Eclipse might be fucking great for web dev, but we'll never know because you need to be some sort of crazy old-school/web-school hybrid programmer/developer to know the particular incantations to make Eclipse work for you.
http://coreygilmore.com/blog/2008/12/01/using-eclipse-for-web-development/
There are, apparently, packages from third parties out there that do the incantations for you, but Eclipse has no excuse for being so impenetrable.
I should theoretically be able to use Eclipse to edit and debug and test PHP, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, and .net and JSP if it ever comes to that. Furthermore, it has SVN and database integration.
Well, it turns out that developing for Eclipse somehow means you have to make everything obtuse and obfuscated for the end users. I just spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to get Eclipse to connect to my database. Actually, it was spent trying to figure out how to get eclipse to recognize the JDBC driver I downloaded for it. It turns out that you can't remotely access a Yahoo! Small Business database externally anyway, but that's a completely different problem.
I haven't even tried to figure out how project management works on the thing. I do know that I can't simply point it at a local copy of a web site and start working. I did download what looked to be helpful PDF files from IBM developer works, but for some reason, their guide to developing in PHP on Eclipse starts with connecting to an Apache Derby database (their directions for that don't work, either) and setting up Tomcat and then goes into a very involved discussion of how to build a Java application to access that DB and run it in Tomcat.
Who the fuck goes to IBM for their documentation anyway. This is the company who put out the manual for DOS 3.3 on loose-leaf in a canvas-covered 3 ring binder.
The following blog echoes a lot of my sentiment. Eclipse might be fucking great for web dev, but we'll never know because you need to be some sort of crazy old-school/web-school hybrid programmer/developer to know the particular incantations to make Eclipse work for you.
http://coreygilmore.com/blog/2008/12/01/using-eclipse-for-web-development/
There are, apparently, packages from third parties out there that do the incantations for you, but Eclipse has no excuse for being so impenetrable.