php coding – Dreamweaver vs Eclipse vs freware alternative PSPad
For a web developer, the coding environment is one of the most important factors in effective work. Being a fresh web developer, it is perhaps even more important to focus on finding the best tools available for coding. The first six months of my career I used Dreamweaver CS4 some and Eclipse some, for my php programming. I found that Eclipse was far better on code completion – but not as good as it is on Java. Even with plug-ins. But Dreamweaver has built-in ftp support, this can of course be bulit in to Eclipse, but I haven’t tried it. You can probably also have a WYSIWYG editor in Eclipse, but I can’t seem to find a distro suiting my needs. And when I install plugins, they tend to introduce bugs to other parts of Eclipse. Frustrating!
When I started working for Kyber now in April, they introduced me to PSPad, as an alternative to the relatively expensive Dreamweaver. It turned out to work great (I have used it for classic asp coding and not for php though) for web development coding! It has a built-in ftp client, this is actually important, and it allows code completion. The only thing I could wish for now, was an advanced SQL database administration panel so that I could edit the DB and the site files in the same application. Now, I remote the IIS server and edit the database directly there by using the MS tool (I don’t remember what it’s called right now).
I have the feeling Eclipse can be tweaked for my needs, if anyone out there knows about a distro including the features I have discussed, please leave a comment to this post. But, for now, still looking for that perfect tool of my dreams – the tool to fall in love with, I can easily recommend trying PSPad. I tried JEdit too, but found it didn’t support drag and drop of files from Explorer in Windows.
More to come on this one – I am planning on building a web site from scratch in pspad. Keep reading the blog!