IDE Love
So, my new (ish...2 months!) job is pure web development using open source technologies. I've been doing it on some level forever, but this is the first job where it's all I do. No management, no business development, no helpdesk, no systems administration. Only web dev: PHP, JS, MySQL, on a Linux server (though my desktop at work is a windows box).
For so long I considered Dreamweaver the standard bearer for web development on a commercial OS. But today I was giddy to find that I have been SO WRONG.
Backstory: I've been using Dreamweaver forever. It's a good PHP dev environment. But I've always been a little disappointed in it. Vague and incomplete code awareness, no type-ahead, generic approach to language independence. It's almost as if Macromedia/Adobe believe that direct support for specific languages would date their product. Like releasing a full upgrade version every 2 years doesn't? Fuck your language agnostic stupidity!
So today work was slightly slower than usual in that I had 3 hours at the end of the day where I had no tasks on my plate with a deadline any sooner than 7 days from now. I started looking for Dreamweaver plugins that would satisfy my need for an honest, complete PHP IDE.
Finding nothing, I decided to give Eclipse, which is free and open source, a try because so many people use it for Java development and it has a PHP specific distribution. I honestly didn't expect to like it, but I'm in love. It's the greatest thing I've seen on my Mac since Photoshop. It rivals VisualStudio and VS is the holy grail of IDEs except that it's so proprietary and Expen$ive. I haven't used anything as great as Eclipse since VS on Windows and there's nothing that even comes close on the Mac.
Goodbye forever, Dreamweaver, you $400 dickhead.
For so long I considered Dreamweaver the standard bearer for web development on a commercial OS. But today I was giddy to find that I have been SO WRONG.
Backstory: I've been using Dreamweaver forever. It's a good PHP dev environment. But I've always been a little disappointed in it. Vague and incomplete code awareness, no type-ahead, generic approach to language independence. It's almost as if Macromedia/Adobe believe that direct support for specific languages would date their product. Like releasing a full upgrade version every 2 years doesn't? Fuck your language agnostic stupidity!
So today work was slightly slower than usual in that I had 3 hours at the end of the day where I had no tasks on my plate with a deadline any sooner than 7 days from now. I started looking for Dreamweaver plugins that would satisfy my need for an honest, complete PHP IDE.
Finding nothing, I decided to give Eclipse, which is free and open source, a try because so many people use it for Java development and it has a PHP specific distribution. I honestly didn't expect to like it, but I'm in love. It's the greatest thing I've seen on my Mac since Photoshop. It rivals VisualStudio and VS is the holy grail of IDEs except that it's so proprietary and Expen$ive. I haven't used anything as great as Eclipse since VS on Windows and there's nothing that even comes close on the Mac.
Goodbye forever, Dreamweaver, you $400 dickhead.