help me understand….
in which the author wonders aloud on questions of nerdery and acronyms. got opinions on IDEs? then you might want to chime in.
I’m not using an IDE for PHP development now.? Alex King (whose blog is down at the moment) has been speaking quite highly of Zend Studio (which I can’t afford) and also mentioned PHPeclipse (which I can afford) as an alternative.
Why would I want to use an IDE?? Why wouldn’t I?
(Don’t know what an IDE is?? Then move along; there’s nothing to see here….)
Personally, I only really found using an IDE useful when working on really big projects in more obscure languages. For instance, writing software agents in Java!
Here’s a good article about the difference in outlook that can make you see an IDE as a hugely useful thing, or just a shinier text editor:
http://osteele.com/archives/2004/11/ides
Thanks! So much do I not come from a programming background.
I’m moving to Eclipse for DSpace hacking because it’s a better way to manage upgrades — Eclipse will silently apply my hacks to the next version of DSpace that comes out, asking me about things only when there’s so much difference between versions that it can’t figure out what to do.
I expect this to save me mucho time, long-term.
Ahhh, that could be useful. Java does seem to be one of the consistent examples for using an IDE.
I may give it a whirl with one project and see how I like it.
What I really want, I think, is something like a PHP-focused version of Dreamweaver. I like the code hinting there, and the syntax coloring, the integrated FTP, and (sometimes) the site manager. Just something that would keep track of my functions would be nice, but where I could dive into hand-coding to my heart’s content.