My apologies for the slowdown in posting. I have a Side Project For Money That Will Not Die and it is occupying almost all my spare time outside of work and family commitments. In the aftermath of the most historic election ever in the United States of America, here is what I’ve been thinking about:
- Komodo 5 is out. If you’ve been looking for an IDE that lets you work with multiple languages, do not waste any more time looking. Go and check it out. (Disclaimer: I am in Activestate’s good books and received a free upgrade to Komodo 5). I have been playing with it (currently I use a different IDE because I am a masochist) but I do use it when I need to break out a debugger for some nasty code. It was weird using Komodo and finding my fingers trying to type all the keystrokes that vim uses
- The Side Project For Money That Will Not Die has really pushed my coding skills forwards by reinforcing the notion to embrace the conventions of the framework your application has been built with. Nothing sharpens the skills up like taking old code and figuring out how to duplicate the functionality under the constraints of a different system. While it is an exercise in coding masochism, I highly recommend everyone doing it at least once.
- Giles Bowkett is a guy you should pay attention to. Sure, he’s a Ruby guy but he’s *very* different from the rest of the Ruby community. Follow his blog and follow him on Twitter too.
- Returning to IDE’s for a second, if you do settle on an editor for your day-to-day use (Komodo, stop poking me in the ribs! Vim is laughing at me now) please, PLEASE, learn what you need to learn to master it. Otherwise you end up like me: typing :V, scrolling down and typing Y in Komodo, then wondering why nothing got copied. Yes, I know there are vim keybindings for it but muscle memory is a very nasty thing.
- It’s all over but the shouting: \ has been chosen as the new separator / indicator for namespaces in PHP 5.3+. My own opinion on this doesn’t really matter, I’m just glad that they have decided.
- Something I saw a few weeks ago in a screencast of a talk that Obie Fernandez gave about the proper way to about being a consultant has totally stuck with me: do exceptional work. Three simple words that a lot of people should pay attention to no matter the environment they happen to be working in. Of course, easier said than done.
- Selenium + PHPUnit + CodeIgniter is helpful, but really, really slow.
- PHPUnit + CodeIgniter is good because I am tired of fixing bugs that would’ve been caught if I had written tests.
I had a look at Komodo after reading your post, and it’s incredibly impressive on paper. Integrated Git support is what got me excited considering we’re in the process of migrating our source control into github and the other developers aren’t exactly pumped about having to babysit a command line all day.
However, once I downloaded it and gave it a shot, I was far less enthusiastic. First off, the git integration doesn’t even work. There are several bugs filed related to source control integration (not just git, people are having problems with SVN too), and ActiveState’s response to these bugs is “wait for 5.0.x”. You don’t go and advertise a feature, release a $250 product and then shrug your shoulders when those features don’t even work!
Also the FTP integration is very weak. You can open single files over FTP one at a time, but you can’t base a project on a remote destination. You would have to “add a remote file” one at a time to the project which is insane (especially since Komodo claims to support remote debugging)…. and it doesn’t make a distinction between remote and local versions of a file. It is baffling to me how few IDEs/Editors get this right.
Komodo does some things right – the code complete is nice (both based on your own code, and the language’s built-in stuff), it loads up pretty quickly and the editor itself seems nice and snappy. If it actually worked as advertised, I’d be championing the purchase of at least 10 licenses…. maybe when 5.0.x comes along
Until then, I’m sticking with Coda <3 on OSX and… well… still looking for something that is less crap than Dreamweaver on Windows (Any other readers have suggestions? Don’t say Eclipse/Aptana either…).
@James If your devs don’t feel like playing around on the command line, take a look at GitX[1] since you’re on OS X. It’s not an IDE, but a nice UI for managing Git, similar to SvnX for subversion.
1. http://gitx.frim.nl/