What Program(s) do You Use for Web Development?

Although I do not code for a living anymore ... Coda.

I used to be a BBedit guy (and still am when i need to do serious line processing or diffs), but BBEdit does most of the job perfectly, and the rest not at all. Coda has a completely different philosophy: do almost all of the job well. Good text editor, project/site management with (S)FTP tools, built-in reference library, CSS editor (for them that likes GUI editors), built-in terminal functions for local or remote servers, uses the Mac's local Apache+PHP server for built-in preview. Preserves your work session when you quit so you can return with your environment intact. Niceties like that.

Coda was designed specifically for editing web sites -- not a general purpose text editor, nor a language-specific IDE. It provides the tools to handle the most common, routine tasks of web development in one spot; it does not attempt to handle complex or highly specialized tasks such as database editing, though i'd like to see Subversion support added to the file manager. It's a pleasure to use.

Would I use it if I lived and breathed code all day like I used to? Maybe. For my current projects, it's a great tool.

(PHP limitation: Mac OS X 10.4 has PHP4 installed; if your frameworks depend upon PHP5, you must compile install it.)

BBEdit Transmit (www.panic.com) Firefox + Firebug Safari w/ debug tools

Beyond that there's not much I need.

I maintain a folder heirarchy that is mirrored from my local machine to the dev server and the live server. Using Transmit's sync and "folder linking" features I'm able to work on or off the server at will. Generally I work offline when doing original creation of files and directly on my testing server when debugging.

Once my code is tested and ready to go live, I do a sync between my machine and the dev server, and then another sync from my machine to the live server. Sometimes this is just one or two files, but Transmit's sync is very smart, so if they're not in the same folder I usually let Transmit do the sync automatically.

I've played with Code, but over the past 10 years I've developed a solid BBEdit based workflow that I'm very happy with and don't want to throw a wrench into.

OH, also I use VMWare Fusion to run 3 Windows VMs. Two Windows XP with IE6 on one and IE7 on the other, and a Windows Vista VM.

I have to say, I've played with almost every dev setup out there to try to break my rather expensive addiction to BBEdit... I ALWAYS come back to dear old BareBones —they collected a few hundred dollars of mine over the years.

Another integral part of my development life is a Wiki for documentation/bug reports/feature requests and a Basecamp free account for Todo list/work log.

www.basecamphq.com

TextMate Transmit Terminal Wikka Wakka Wiki SVN

From 1997 up until two weeks ago I was BBEdit user (and I still might switch back). If you're making the switch from BBEdit to TextMate, check out this guy's TextMate theme that replicates BBEdit's syntax highlighting: http://www.infocraft.com/articles/switching_to_textmate/

We use Adobe Products here, but our Contractor is a HUGE, HUGE fan of Eclipse. He is self-proclaimed "lazy" and loves that Eclipse does a lot of the guess work for him. Whether its monitoring information, validating, code hints, etc. He loves it. The big selling point for him is the crazy amount of FREE, that's right, FREE plugins.

Oh, and Eclipse is free too.

Im a Java Developer so for Web Development im using Exadel Studio for now but as i see eclipse 3.3 have a nice JSF editor so maybe i will switch to 100% Eclipse 3.3 Europa for Enterprise Developers.

What I use for coding depends on where I am.

At work I use:

Notepad++ / vim (using PuTTY)

At home I use:

Dreamweaver CS3's code view / Notepad++

On my Mac I use:

TacoHTML (though I don't like this one)

My line up:

TextMate Transmit Terminal Firefox/Firebug

I tried using BBEdit for a while (and the free "Text Wrangler" version as well, which seemed to do just about everything I'd want to do in BBEdit), but found it was just too complicated for what I wanted to do.

Before I switched to a Mac I used Dreamweaver, and I agree with Will here; it's great for site development, especially the site management feature. However I don't want to eat up 150-300mb of RAM to edit a PHP file.

It was the same way on the Mac. Even CS3's Intel native version is a hog.

I tried Coda, but I didn't like the interface or even the idea. It felt like FrontPage with a decent interface.

Then Jeff introduced me to TextMate, and that was the end of it. What a great program. Errol, if you haven't tried it I'd suggest you give it a whirl. It's not too cheap, but it's stable, easy to use, and it doesn't feel like the same pricing model. You could probably use the current version forever.

@David G. Paul

I've tried TacoHTML and found that Smultron was much better in the similar vein, though as a free product, NOTHING beats BBEdit's little brother TextWrangler.

http://smultron.sourceforge.net/ http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/

All on OSX: Jetbrains IntelliJ Idea Textmate DBVisualizer Fireworks Interarchy Path Finder Firebug Web Developer Toolbar

JCX VS.PHP

Linux: vim, Kate, Notepad++ with Wine, and virtualized IE6 / 7 (I hate it, but since the world is dumb and mostly uses IE)

Firefox (Crucial) Web Developer Toolbar, Firebug

As a web developer I also spend most of my time at work writing HTML/CSS and PHP. I have a Windows machine and use the following software (more than just editors/IDEs):

Firefox with: Firebug, Web Developer Toolbar, CollorZilla, Tamper Data. Internet Explorer 7 with IE developer toolbar Virtual PC 2007 with an image containing Internet Explorer 6 and IE developer toolbar CSSVista Programmers Notepad 2 (coding) Navicat (SQL) Safari beta (Windows version) browsrcamp.com for real Safari screenshots Opera 9 with Web Developer Toolbar & Menu

I love it when people complain about users using IE. Makes me all warm and fuzzy to feel the internet glow that is our combined eliteness regarding browser choice. Especially in the industry of supplying customer need. It's the tastiest form of Irony.

Customer: I need an IE compatible product. WebBA: I only develop for Firefox, but I'm here for your needs. Customer: Yeah, I still need an IE compatible product.

vim vim vim!

@Errol Sayre

thanks! I'll give it a try :)

Can't bear Dream?weaver. HTMLPad! And browsers

Never got away from HomeSite+... just the color coding... hand code everything still.

I used to be a Dreamweaver guy, been on the beta team for the last three releases and been generaly happy about it! (Great code view, and site management rocked) But after some mishaps with the latest version (ftp manager uploading cached files (3-4 days old) from the local DW file cache and overwriting one of my colleague's 3 days of hard work) I started looking for alternatives.

Most of my colleagues use Zend now, they where all using Homesite+ untill just a month ago, but Zend just don't cut it for day-to-day web2.0 work with a lot of javascript work..

Stumbled upon Aptana, the #1 js plugin for eclipse, and despite some weaknesses in their ftp integration, it's a killer app!

So my setup is currently like this: - Eclipse, with Aptana (JS/CSS/HTML) and CFEclipe (CFML) - fileZilla - Firefox, with firebug, MeassureIt, HTML Validator, ColorZilla and web developer toolbar - DBDesigner 4

I'm going to try out that phpED, searching google for programs better than dreamweaver CS3, just horrible. 100% cpu usage bug, and it was freaking copying, my index.php file to ALL MY OTHER INDEX FILES, it almost screwed up 1 week of FULL TIME work.

getting raid of that, and thisPHPed sounds COOL! mysql sync with php, AWESOME!