Choosing a good IDE

When I started doing web development in the mid 90s, I did most of my development in Notepad.  I just wanted something that did simple text editing and nothing more.  What I didn't know was what more was possible.  Since then I've bounced around between a bunch of different IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) which are essentially Notepad on steroids. 

Picking the right IDE is a very important and personal choice for all developers since we spend so much time and rely so heavily on them.  This can be seen in the vi vs emacs wars.  While I started out with notepad, I soon found that there were some major shortfalls with it even as a basic text editor (such as always saving line endings in windows format!).   I used Visual Studios for a while when I was doing .NET development but when I switched to Drupal and PHP, I needed something that would work with PHP.

I've followed Mozilla for a very long time, including downloading the original source code for 5.0 in 1998 and trying out the Milestones for Netscape 6.  When I saw that Active State was creating an IDE using the Mozilla framework, I thought I would give it a try.  I used it for over a year but never really felt like it had a lot of the features I was looking for (in the free version).

I'd heard ruminations about Eclipse so I thought I'd check it out.  At first I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread since it had all the power and features I was looking for.  After installing PDT and Aptana, I could get it to do most of what I wanted it to, eventually.  It was really slow and updates always failed.  There seemed to be 10 times more options than I would ever need.

I saw a discussion yesterday morning about IDEs and someone mentioned the same frustrations I had with eclipse and said they found Netbeans to be a breath of fresh air.  So I immediately downloaded and started using Netbeans.  Wow!  It is fast, cross platform and does everything I need from the start without a need to install a million plugins.  It is also very focused on being a good IDE instead of trying to be a platform like eclipse.  As with any product, there are still a few bugs.  The eclipse project importer won't import PHP projects and every time I upload files with FTP, I get an error message (everything uploads though).  I'm sure these will be fixed soon though and since everything else is 10,000x better, I'll stick it out a while.

If you haven't tried it out yet, I highly recommend firing up netbeans and seeing if it works for you.

http://php.netbeans.org/