Happy 3rd Birthday DevBlog!
As of last week it has been 3 years since Dustin and I opened the doors, and while life has taken us different directions we keep on posting.
It's true, it really has been 3 years and to tell the truth we've gone a bit farther than I even thought we would. When we started this blog it was a place for us to drop notes and help us help others with learning code, programming, and even do a little off-topic random posts. I flooded the devblog with posts I'd grabbed from other resources, and Dustin threw in some fantastic PHP and jQuery work. Here's to another year and hoping that we continue to get bigger and better.
And now some interesting/boring facts about the DevBlog:
Our most popular post is "PhoneGap - The missing android/windows guide"
While the United States is the country that visits us the most, we have far more visitors outside The States than in them.
Visitors from the United States make up 24% of our traffic, while Germany makes up 13% and India makes 12%
Australia spends the most time on the site, followed closely by our United Kingdom visitors.
This post makes 123 posts on the DevBlog.
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Online IDEs (work in a browser)
So as previously mentioned I have a cr48, is it awesome? absolutely, do I use it? not so much. Why don't I use it very much? It is a slightly complicated story. You see I had an HP mini 311 for my netbook, and what I have found out is that the 311 was not a netbook. Sadly it turns out I did many things with the 311 that I can no longer do with an actual netbook. To make it worse, it turns out that the things I do on a netbook are the same things I do on my phone (Samsung Galaxy S - Epic).
So what does that have to do with Online IDEs? Everything. I have to code, I don't know why, but I have this compulsive obsession with coding. It doesn't even matter what, it can be php, java, html, js, actionscript, whatever, as long as it can be thrown together and I can get it to compile, I have inner peace.
So back to the cr48, just because it can't code out of the box doesn't mean you can't code on it. I stumbled onto a few IDEs today that are online and can do some simple compiling. While it's true that they most cannot actual compile and render code for your playback use on the cr48, but they can save projects, upload via ftp, and even open in different IDEs.
CodeRun IDE - This is a great little browser-based IDE. Sign up is free and it will store your projects online for you. It does have a simple debugging tool, and even comes with some code-stubs to get your started (c#, php, and some js libs). Overal the look and feel is good and it fits the screen rather well. My only complaint is the that password on your account is seriously weak-sauce. I mean no special characters? For-the-love-of-whatever-gimped-db-the-backend-is-using why!? But do not let that stop you from trying it out.
Kodingen - This is an interesting little web-mash. You can grab a free account, set it to connect to your own FTP, and even get Shell access to your files. It is in beta so don't expect too much out of the box, that being said, this is a very nice offering. The site is clean and offers editing in multiple other online IDEs (Bespin, Codemirror, Ymacs), it also has a great control panel that lets you see your projects and manage your options. I have not signed up on this one yet, but it looks like a great bet to start getting your code together for when you are on the go, or borrowing someone else's cr48.
Eclipse Orion - This had been announced in 2008, and it is gaining momentum. You can download the source now if you want, but keep in mind that the project is still in the incubator. Check out this post for a little Q&A, and check this post from the "Life at Eclipse" Blog for some screenshots and little more information about the Orion Project.
IBM alphaWorks - I won't lie, I just barely found this so I have not tried it out. However since I use more than my fair share of IBM products are work, I am sure that if you try your hardest for a month and a half, open a PMR, and then fix it yourself using undocumented methods that void your service contract, this will work for you. This looks a bit like the Orion project, only with some added http/jetty translation. Also this may be a firefox only kind of browser IDE, so Chrome users get ready to drop a pass on this one.
PHPanywhere - I have not signed up with this one yet either, but I've heard a little buzz about it. This is another great little editor with syntax highlights, FTP access, project management, and some collaboration features. It is still in beta so expect new features coming and a possible shift in workflow.
shiftEDIT - Another one in the running, support for editing and publishing PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, HTML, CSS, and JS. Supports FTP and SFTP and has a syntax highlighter. Another bonus is revision history and code snippets. It has a familiar flash/flex style interface which is very clean and has right-click support and plenty of context menus. You will need to set up your domain/FTP account to do the live testing, but overal a very nice and simple IDE.
Hopefully this gets you coding and not thinking that netbooks are just for surfing the internet 
.
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Notepad++ the New IDE
So, as Phil mentioned I did move across the country, and for no reason other than to get out of surviving another Idaho/Utah winter...and a pretty amazing job opportunity. Which is what brings me to the dev blog today.
Since I got here I'd been using Aptana as my IDE, and generally speaking I love the Aptana/Eclipse IDE's mostly because of the tools that they have that make writing code so easy. However I've become a little frustrated with Aptana as of late because it seems to chew and chew and chew on the memory. And I noticed that at least once a day I was killing it and restarting it just to get some measurable performance back.
Anyhow one fine day about a week ago I was trying to view an .sql file in notepad++ (which I've always kept around as a quick editor) and noticed that the escaping of quotes was not quite rendering in the editor. I mentioned this to the author of said file and he mentioned I should try the "bespin" theme in n++ which I promptly did and thoroughly enjoyed. This lead me to investigate the plug-ins that notepad++ has, like I said I've always used notepad++ to some extent, I've just never paid much attention to the many plug-ins available to it (and there are many).
To make a long story short I've effectively replaced my Aptana IDE with Notepad++ and it's various useful plug-ins. At the onset I knew there were a few things notepad++ would have to have in order to make the switch and not hate it, they are as follows:
1. an Explorer view - I hate doing File->open and browsing, an explorer view is much more efficient
2. an Outline view - I've become addicted to the ability of Eclipse based IDE's to click on a method name in the outline and go directly to that method.
3. Debugger - this one is a big one, in my opinion debuggers cut troubleshooting time down by more than 50%
Nice to haves:
1. ctrl + click - It's always nice to be able to jump directly to a declaration with this simple combination
2. intellisense/auto-complete
3. SVN - I currently don't use SVN but it's nice know there's a plugin available.
In my quest I promptly found that I already had the Explorer plug-in installed (and it's simply called Explorer). And while the look and feel of the view is a little different than Eclipse, it gets the job done and I have no qualms with it.
I was also able to find an Outline plug-in called "Function List". It's a little rugged in appearance but nonetheless gets the job done and the best part is it's not attached to the main view and therefore not making viewing the code a pain.
I thought there would be no way a debugger plug-in would be as effective as the Xdebug setup for Aptana/Eclipse. I was wrong. DBGp is everything I hoped I would find in a debugger (and it uses xdebug, how awesome is that?), like the others it lacks some in the aesthetic department but it is simple to set up, easy to navigate and it works. I did have a little trouble getting it working at first but then I found this Tutorial and I was off and running.
As for the "nice to haves" since Notepad++ 5.0 you can turn on auto-complete from the settings->preferences->Backup/Auto-Completion menu, simply check "Enable auto-completion" and if you'd like check "Function parameters hint on input" to enable hints to the parameters a method expects.
I haven't found a great ctrl+click plug-in but I'm hoping one will come soon. There have been some attempts but they pale in comparison to what Eclipse has done.
As mentioned SVN is available (I believe there is more than one plug-in for it) but I haven't tried it. Another one that get's honorable mention is "Falling Bricks" it's just like Tetris, and handy on days you've got nothing else to do for staying awake while your code is compiling.
Once the plug-ins were installed I decided to give my new N++ IDE a spin for a full day. I have to admit I felt a bit naked at first, but it's been almost a week now and I've gotten to where I enjoy the draft.
Just for comparison I fired up all of my new plug-ins at one time and checked the memory consumption of notepad++, a mere 35M compared to the 235M Aptana gobbles up immediately after startup (and without being in Debug mode). I'll probably keep Aptana around for a while (at least until a satisfactory ctrl+click comes along for notepad++) but I've been using notepad++ for a few days now and haven't missed the bulkiness of Aptana one bit.
EDIT (2011.02.15): I'd like to point out that when I wrote this post I was at work on two (2) 17" monitors (no not even widescreen, but who wants 17" widescreen anymore?). However a few days ago I set this up on my home PC with a single 20" widescreen monitor (and much much better resolution options) and Oh my Giddy Aunt! I couldn't believe how Eclipse® like it looks, I almost wept.
EDIT (2011.11.03): I recently revisited the plugins department and I have some more goodness.
#1 while Explorer is handy I find Light Explorer much more to my liking. it uses one window instead of two and seems to be much quicker at launch.
#2 Xbrackets Light - automatically closes a bracket pair when the opening bracket is typed. I had been missing this more than I knew.
#3 Window Manager / File Switcher - both accomplish the same goal, which is to provide a quick way to switch between open files, but File Switcher uses an always detached frame, whereas Window Managers frame can either be detached or attached to the main npp frame. Window Manager allows you to turn off the tab bar which also could be useful. So pick your poison, or do what I do and use both until you can commit to one.
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Long time, no posts
Wow, it's been nearly 4 months since the last post and well, I suppose I'm mostly to blame for that. Dustin moved across the country so he has been understandably too busy to post. I've been crazy-busy at work (Q4 and Q1 are my busy times) and well I've totally let the ball slip.
Having said that, there are some new posts in the works and I'll outline them below just to get you excited about the things to come.
- I've nixed the LinkPosts (too much time, didn't feel they were adding value to the site)
- I'm writing a little post on the CR-48 (yes I have one, thanks Google!)
- Ever wanted to enable cart persistence on Websphere Commerce Enterprise 6.0 and found the help from IC and the PMR you submitted not work in your favor? Yeah me too, but I'll save you 3 weeks and 4 different techs working on the problem with just 3ish simple things to check for total cart persistencery (if your customers don't wipe out their cookies like I do everytime I close Chrome-Fox).
- Instead of LinkPosts I think I'll just write quick little posts on the things I find that could be useful.
As always drop a comment with suggestions, greets, or questions.
~Phil
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