What Program(s) do You Use for Web Development?
by Will Bond - July 11, 2007 / 2:09pm
As a developer, I have always found that good development tools can make a huge amount of difference in productivity and general enjoyment while programming. Ideally these tools help you automate the redundant tasks and leave the important decisions to you. Since I spend on average 7+ hours a day writing HTML/CSS & PHP and working with servers, I’m always on the lookout for tools that help me get the job done.
Out of all of the people here at iMarc who touch HTML/CSS or PHP, I think the current tally of program use is:
- Dreamweaver: 6
- TextMate: 3 4
- BBEdit: 2 1
- PHPEd: 1 (That’s me!)
The six people in our production teams who use Macs all use the OSX terminal for server interaction, while the six Windows users tend to fire up Putty.
For the first year here I used Dreamweaver. It is certainly a decent development environment. It has site management (a key feature in my mind), plus a decent text editor, and really poor design mode. It really does leave a bit to be desired in terms of speed and the features of the text editor.
I think spend a six or so month period of trying all sorts of different PHP editors and IDEs. If I were to search Google, I could probably find 20 or more that I tried. Most of them missed the site management features I found essential in Dreamweaver, and others had terrible interfaces. Then I struck gold with PHPEd. No, I’m not getting paid by Nusphere to review their product, it really is just that good.
It is laid out like Visual Studio 2005 (if you have ever used it) and has lots of great features, including:
- Site/project management (similar to Dreamweaver)
- Powerful text editor
- Code insight for built-in PHP functions, etc
- Code insight for YOUR code, via PhpDoc comments
- An integrated terminal/ssh client (it is almost good enough to replace Putty)
- An integrated database browser/client for MySQL, Postgres, MSSQL, Oracle, SQLite and Firebird
- SFTP, FTP and WebDav support
- Windows shell integration (allows you to use programs like TortoiseSVN in the IDE)
- A built in web server running PHP4/5 for local testing
- A crazy PHP debugger and profiler
- Integrated IE and Mozilla browsers
I’ve yet to find a PHP IDE that fits my needs nearly as well as PHPEd. That said, what do you use for development? Let me know what you use, even if you program in a different language.
Comments have been turned off on this blog.
Read something more recent.
RSS
21 Comments
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.)
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.
www.basecamphq.com
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/
Oh, and Eclipse is free too.
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)
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.
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/
Jetbrains IntelliJ Idea
Textmate
DBVisualizer
Fireworks
Interarchy
Path Finder
Firebug
Web Developer Toolbar
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
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
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.
thanks! I'll give it a try :)
And browsers
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
getting raid of that, and thisPHPed sounds COOL! mysql sync with php, AWESOME!