lifebsideben

I haven’t actually been writing a ton of code lately, mostly small stuff for work, and that’s pretty much all Emacs (in console mode, over ssh…) although I actually did hack out a small PHP script entirely in vi last week (the horror! I totally suck at vi, but it was necessity.)

Based on an email I got today, and a comment from a co-worker, I decided to take a quick survey of some of the state of the art in web-friendly IDEs–for coding in PHP5 (my primary language these days), JavaScript, CSS, and the language I keep making false starts at, Ruby.

Now, the last time I did a lot of serious development in the “environment of my choosing” it was with Komodo 2.5, for the version of prince.org you can find at the site now. I definitely liked a lot of things about Komodo (PHP highlighting, fairly extensible, reasonable “project” support, groks Perl exceptionally, etc.), and disliked some others (memory hog, some bugs including crash-inducers, full version isn’t cheap, etc.)

So I got an email today from ActiveState (the Komodo folks) that announced their latest version, 4.0, along with–surprise!–a stripped down version (no CVS support, no remote debugging, etc.) called “Komodo Edit” (the full version is “Komodo IDE“). Now, the coolest bit is that Komodo Edit is FREE, and still has a ton of great features (yeah, even Ruby goodness). Definitely a download! And as much as I might miss integrated CVS features, even the upgrade price is $145, so that is a little steep for me–especially when I don’t actually have a project to work on to justify it.

Now, it just so happens that one of my web developers from L.A. was in our office today and also mentioned that they had started playing with the Aptana editor, which is essentially a massive Eclipse plugin for javascript/css/html/ajax development. This also looks very cool, and although I’ve had some less than totally positive experience with Eclipse (mostly because it can be so slow, inexplicably–even beyond the badly-timed garbage collection “java-itis” I’d expect), but this looked very nice. And, they’ve got good PR going, with a whole bunch of nifty, and pretty succinct, screencasts to show it in action. Now, if the phpEclipse folks have made continued progress since when I last tried it (when it was overall not a pretty sight), we might have something here. I see there is a RubyEclipse project, so going to check that out (and the even cooler-looking RadRails plugins) for sure.

The last one I’ve recently tried out is the Zend Studio 5.5. As much as I’ve wanted to like Zend products, aside from the Accelerator (hands down the best PHP opcode cache, and yes, really, really, better than the free ones), I’ve had a difficult time getting too excited about their stuff. This was especially true with really early versions of Studio. The latest one is surprisingly zippy (I’m very impressed with the speed they’ve wrenched out of Java–on a PPC Mac especially), and while it does great PHP highlighting and impressive HTML/PHP intermix highlighting and syntax parsing, it looks and acts like an IDE designed by coders, and I don’t feel I could be as productive with it as with some others (although it’s about par with the older Komodo releases.) That’s just not good enough for $300, in my eyes.

I’m off to play with Komodo Edit and Aptana! We’ll see who “wins” for my needs…