Kevin Quillen

I have officially ditched and uninstalled Adobe Dreamweaver as of last week.

Adobe Dreamweaver, an IDE of choice out of reason of limited option and necessity, I had been looking at it as nothing more than bloatware as its performance started degrading over time. It was ‘okay’ for Coldfusion development (only due to the code intelligence really), but I don’t do that primarily anymore, only when handling legacy stuff and that is rare these days. It also costs a few grand a year to upgrade to the latest version of CS with enough licenses to supply the office, and I don’t agree with that either. I see the value in Photoshop, but not much else. That money is better used elsewhere. I mean what is Dreamweaver anyway other than a pricey text editor? Does anyone really use Spry or all the crap inside Dreamweaver? I’m betting on ‘no’ and if they are, god help them.

Also, I was getting increasingly frustrated with TortoiseSVN client, its bugginess, clunky UI and major hog of system resources. It would often slow me down as it was doing whatever it does in the background in regards to caching. If I had more than 5 projects that were SVN managed, I would lock up quite often when browsing around the file system. I assume Tortoise was trying to update the caches with the remote server. It was even worse when we used hosted Beanstalk SVN outside the office.

Enter Eclipse. I have used Eclipse sparingly in the past, in 2006 and 2007 when it was not quite as stable as it is today. I also had a good trial run of Aptana, before they discontinued support for PHP. Aptana was based off of Eclipse, it had FTP/SFTP/SVN integration (Eclipse itself did not back then) and the tools necessary to get the job done. However, we still did Coldfusion at the time, and it wasn’t good for that. So the effort was shelved. Now we are Drupal/PHP ninjas, and it was time to revisit this IDE and step into the upper tier of application development.

I demo’ed Komodo Edit, Eclipse PDT, and Aptana. Aptana did not support PHP anymore, only older versions did, and it was prone to crashing on our machines quite a bit. It was immediately thrown out the window. Komodo would seem like a good fit, but the free version does not support debugging, CVS/FTP/SFTP/SVN integration. It was also disqualified. So we’re back to Eclipse PDT.

After spending 20 minutes customizing the preferences to my liking, we were up and running. I installed the Subversive SVN plugin with appropriate SVN connectors. I can’t begin to tell you how much better this is than using TortoiseSVN. Integration within the IDE is essential, and powerful. I have the SVN repos in one monitor and my workspace in another monitor. After reading a little documentation, all it takes is a simple Check Out command from the SVN Perspective, and Eclipse does the rest. It can check out a site that is 1000-2000 files in about 30 seconds very quickly (Tortoise would choke), automatically create the project for you in your workspace, and you’re ready to develop. Compare that to having to Check Out to a directory somewhere, open Dreamweaver, create a site, find the files, blah blah blah. That shit is amateur and time consuming and these days and time is money.

Another great thing about Eclipse is they have stable releases for Windows, OSX, and Linux in both 32 and 64 bit. I can take Eclipse, add the plugins I need, then put that on a USB drive and use it from any other Windows or OSX system where needed and nothing will have changed. Try that with other IDEs that require installation and all that headache. That’s right, Eclipse doesn’t require installing. For example, I could take Eclipse PDT, add the plugins that we need, and distribute it on the local network. Boom, every employee has the same uniform version of Eclipse without requiring any configuration, plugin downloading, or license activation.

Giggity.