Builder AU have an article testing four Web development tools based on ease of use, features and functionality, User interface development, code development, platform and language support, and documentation. Products tested include Zend, ASP.NET WebMatrix, Dreamweaver MX, and NitroX.
Web development IDEs tested
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
And they didn’t test god so many good stuff. Think Nvu. Think Bluefish. Think glimmer. Ehh, I won’t even go on. I don’t like reviews like this. I could say I test C coding ide’s and leave out devcpp, kdevelop or glimmer and only talk about MSDE and Borland, and it would be just as no-use as this one.
Coding web applications is a terrible work. But i don’t think that it’s a problem of some ide. What i hate is to mix code and graphics togheter. Php jsp asp are pretty similar. Probably a good language client side shold a good way. Dismember server side code from client one.
bye,
DarkBrain
from the article: “For PHP developers, the main competitor to Zend Studio would have to be notepad.”
Urrrqk? I can’t think of a single PHP developer I know who tries to code in Notepad, which is possibly the worst utility ever made by Microsoft. Probably UltraEdit and Dreamweaver are the two most common PHP tools for Windows users. Maybe Textpad. But there are plenty more, including some very nice IDEs, not to mention the good coding environments for *nix. The article makes it sound as if Zend didn’t have to do a lot of work to be competitive, when in fact they did, and they did a very good job of it.
For separating design from the code see http://smarty.php.net or http://xtemplate.sourceforge.net They are very useful when you design say in Dreamweaver and code say in Editplus. Code never gets mixed with HTML markup this way.
I always code in Vim, weather I’m using windows or linux.
It is a powerfull editor that can highlight just about any language imaginable.
Vim is not quite as spartan as most traditional vi implementations, in fact gvim (GUI version) really is best-of-both-worlds in a lot of ways.
I’ll stick to BBEdit and a couple web browsers for testing.
skEdit rules for Macs. BBEdit is crap.
-adam
Unfortunately you have to test on IE, so unless you run VirtualPC the Mac is at a disadvantage and therefore so is BBEdit.
[quote]For creating table-intensive or precise layouts, WebMatrix has a way to and it can be cumbersome trying to position objects on the page.[/quote]
A quote regarding Zend Studio:
“the tool lacks a WYSIWYG editor, which means that you need to know a bit about HTML as well as PHP”
Are there seriously people that know want to use PHP to develop a website, yet don’t have any idea how to write HTML?
“the main competitor to Zend Studio would have to be notepad”
Do we really need to comment on this…? All I can say is “wow”
…as IDE for everything on mac osx and linux. it’s a superb IDE. when it comes to web applications, i would only whish, there would be any good RAD IDEs for building the web-interfaces. dreamweaver is more for websites than for webbased UIs in my opinion and hand-coding can often be very big and time consuming task.
Didn’t read the article so can not comment on the IDEs discussed but I will mention a very nice editor called SciTE. There are versions for Linux and Windows. It has the usual toys like tabs and syntax highlighting. SciTE even prints the colors too.
SciTE really rocks!
http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/SciTE.html
I am a long time Zend user (and I admit I’m a big fan), so I was a bit surprised to see Zend in there. Zend is a PHP development tool, not a website design editor. A WYSIWYG editor is not something I am keen on seeing in Zend. There are other things I am hoping they will add, but that is not one of them.
As far as I am concerned, Zend is the top of the line when it comes to PHP editing, and it only keeps getting better. It’s a programmers tool, not a web site designers tool.
For windows:
PHPEdit
http://www.waterproof.fr/
For Linux:
Quanta Plus
http://quanta.sourceforge.net/
– Dreamweaver is great for an Apple Powerbook.
– Running Virtual PC with IIS installed,
you can code natively in DreamWeaver and push the code into a Shared folder and run it in IIS. DreamWeaver has Code Completion and it works well.
– You can develop in ASP and ASP.Net
– I use JBuilder 2005 on the Mac for JSP code.
– Note: Sun’s Java Studio Creator is available for Mac
for Java Server Faces Development.
To get VPC to run snappily you need
1) memory
2) to turn every automatic feature OFF in win XP
– clock
– desktop wallpapaer
– all gui eye candy
– screen saver
– autoUpdates
– uninstall Ms IM, Windows Media Player, games,
MSN Explorer….
You get the idea.
You could also do this with a Dell and get the Fast machine you bought, but that Dell mis-configured and made unusable.
well, i mostly used dreamweaver’s code editor, i dont bother with its wyswyg features. cuz i dont know how. I usually code the html and the php there..
I’m surprised no one mentioned the Eclipse IDE. I tend to use Eclipse + the php plugin a lot. It’s also a big plus that it’s cross-platform.
I also use Dreamweaver a lot – for putting together the pages initially, and for form design.
Vim and SciTE are two of my favorite editors. I prefer them over any IDEs for web development (although I do like Zend Studio okay). IDEs seem to be more hassle than they are worth.
The last site I worked on was all done in SciTE, and I was quite satisfied with it as a web development tool. (go to http://www.shopdarkhour.com if you want to see the results).
I’m getting frustrated with EditPlus for my web development, and Dreamweaver MX 2004 (which I have) is too bloated when I just want good syntax highlighting, code insight and preferably some scriptability. Any suggestions? I want something light on resources, simple (not a collection of 1,000 wizard buttons) but with the few features listed above. Any suggestions? And it must be a native Windows tool, I can’t stand GTK+.
Damien
Notepad versus Zend? Is he serious, notepad is the most basic of basic text editors. Under Windows i used to use UltraEdit, but since we switched the office over to Linux we have only used Zend, and its a joy to use, not as heavy as Dreamweaver, and heavily integrated into PHP and the Zend tools suite, if anyone is serious about PHP it has to be Zend Studio. I cant beleave anyone serious mentioned notepad, first of all it has no syntax highlighting, no files tab so one can easily work on several files at the same time, which is an absolute necessity, and.. Well, why compare crap to gold?
And no, if you are delivering web apps. to costumers you do not need to test with IE. We delivered several apps that we dident test with IE; As long as they know which one to choose to go to their system its fine, its only if you need a public webapp that IE testing has any meaning at all. We have long told costumers that we only deliver to modern platforms such as Opera, Gecko or Safari. IE complicated the matters alot as it borks on some of the more modern things we want to do to simplify the design and style. We would happily deliver a working copy for IE, but we’ll have to charge an extra handful of hours, because of IE hack-arounds. Thats the way it is.
I recently got acquainted with Eclipse and the PHP plugin, they are an extremely powerful combination.
It’s a multi-platform, open source development environment by IBM. Although it’s primarily based for Java development, it’s plugin based so you can find plugins for just about any language (C,C++,PHP,PERL,Java,C#,…)
Advantages: syntax highligting, code completion, cvs integration, sql integration, team synchronization, debugger, …
Eclipse: http://www.eclipse.org/
PHPEclipse: http://www.phpeclipse.de/
More plugins: http://www.eclipse-plugins.info/
PHPBuilder Article: http://phpbuilder.com/columns/chow20040921.php3
/dev/aram
To do php coding I like:
It is clean, small, works and it is available for windows/linux.
http://www.nusphere.com/
quanta plus here, it’s the best web development tool available on linux for me.
Quanta plus is the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen.
I opened a web page, switched to the visual editor and to my surprise I couldn’t even change a font.
No button on the toolbar, no menu entry to pick a font.
Quanta maybe fine for coders but until it’s usable for regular web page editing I will have to ignore it as if it didn’t exist. Shame realy, since it looks like they put a lot of work into it.
In other words, there is no web page editing for Linux.
None I’ve seen that let you pick a specific font and size form a tool bar or menu.
Pretty sad realy.
No one tried MyEclipse or W4T plugins for eclipse? They seems to be very interesting.
Hell yea. gVim > all.
I used to use Quanta but older versions had this bug where it would become extremely slow if you opened a file of more than 500 lines or so.
Around that time, Bluefish became useable, and I still swear by it, but recently my project got so huge that I had to get Zend. So far, I’m very happy. Once you have instantaneous access to all your symbols and easy project-wide search replacek, not to mention code analysis, you won’t go back.
All I ask from a PHP editor is syntax highlighting, tab handling, and some way to save over scp.
KDE’s kate, for instance, is perfect.
Now, back to VS.net/ASP.NET . *sigh*
So they reviewed all the major web languages, php, asp,jsp and forgot perl. go to http://www.xarka.com for optiperl
It’s syntax highlighting is unique and a real benefit for coding perl, not to mention all the other stuff it does.