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Sorry for the wall of text, I did put some line breaks in that! Also worth mentioning, have your kiddo look into stuff like LESSCSS or SASS. http://lesscss.org/ You won't see this stuff out of the box (maybe some limited support with plugins) in any modern WYSIWYG, but its awesome. Most modern websites are leaning JS/jQuery heavy too, which was part of why I made a decision to switch over to Eclipse and give that a crack. Aptana Studio can be added as a plugin, and it makes IMO 'HTML5' development that much easier. See http://www.aptana.com/

"I think you are confusing 3 different topics: ..."

No, I am not. The question was whether Microsoft was "forward thinking". That is what I was responding to. Not personal preference, but my opinion (and those of others) about how "forward thinking" it is.

"The .NET compiler is an example of heavy innovation in compiler design. That has nothing to do with it being popular, nor much to do with the criteria for which you like Ruby on Rails."

Nonsense. The .NET compiler was an example of heavy innovation 11 years ago, which is the point I was making. The "criteria" for which I "like" Ruby on Rails is directly relevant to the discussion, because those criteria are: (1) it is an implementation of a newer-technology, dynamic language, and (2) it is being actively and rapidly improved by a growing user base. There is no "confusion" there.

"Further desktop application development is extremely expensive, and most of the work is outsourced to the 3rd world at this point"

That is false on both counts. First, desktop application development is cheaper than ever due to open-source tools (unless you are developing with Microsoft tools, of course), and second, while outsourcing was big for many years, that trend has already begun to reverse. So for someone speaking about "new and innovative" things, you are surprisingly behind the times.

"There are no good IDE's for dynamic languages, that cross over to the static languages. IBM / Eclipse has the same problem, and remember IBM owns rational so they are even larger, as did Embarcadero (the old Borland people)."

Again, complete nonsense. The open-source Radrails (now part of Aptana Studio 3), which was built on Eclipse, has been a very successful IDE for Ruby and Rails development. As have NetBeans and several others.

Are you saying that huge companies like Microsoft and IBM can't build effective IDEs for dynamic languages, but that Open Source developers can? Hmmm...

There isn't any particular problem with creating IDEs for dynamic languages. Most who develop with dynamic languages -- most of those who aren't beginners, anyway -- simply prefer not to use them.

"Now if you mean Rails is a better framework for development of light apps than Microsoft..."

What do you define as a "light app"? Twitter? Revolution Health? YellowPages.com? IBM Global Services is building enterprise applications for its clients using Ruby, and sometimes Rails. And so is ThoughtWorks. Here is a partial list of organizations that use not just Ruby but Rails for many of their enterprise-level applications.

"When they did: VBScript and ActiveX were extremely impressive technologies."

Yes, they were. 11 years ago.

"Essentially for Microsoft to do what you would want regarding Ruby, they would fork Visual Basic further away from C#. That is not a technology or innovation problem they just don't want to create applications with no easy migration path."

Not at all. They made great (if difficult) progress with IronRuby, to the point of actually producing some alpha releases that were largely compliant with Ruby specs. Then they just dumped it. My friend who worked on the project could not give me an actual technical reason for their decision: apparently it was just something Microsoft decided not to pursue any longer.

That's the first thing I thought as well. Eclipse is a good "delivery system" for their dev projects overall, I'm sure they have plenty of people already working on the general Eclipse project. But I think they might/should go further. Look at Aptana -- it's specifically designed for web development. They could design Eclipse "variants" that are specific to Android-programming and, possibly, some version that facilitates programming NaCl modules.

Surely you must mean Aptana?

You also might want to check out Sequel Pro (successor to CocoaMySQL). Also, I like Aptana, its Eclipse but easier to use.

You're confusing a variety of unrelated things here. Javascript works fine in every browser that implements standards accordingly (that is, every browser with the exception of IE 6, 7 and 8). The language is not only consistent across browser, it's actually implementing some really interesting features such as list comprehension, generators, and block scoping.

And I don't know where you get the idea that debugging Javascript is any more difficult than any other scripting language. You can't claim to be a professional JS dev and not have heard of some tools.

Oh, and as a scripting language, it is one of the fastest dynamically typed languages available, in the same league as SmallTalk and Lua. The fact that Palm developers obviously used the wrong tool for the wrong job does not in any way detract from the qualities of the language.

Methinks there's a lot of people that talk crap about Javascript but have never bothered to get the proper documentation and tools. Newsflash for everyone: anyone who does professional Python and Ruby development uses debuggers and text editors specifically for that job. Just because JS runs on the browser doesn't mean it doesn't need the same level of attention.

I heavily prefer Aptana Studio (from http://aptana.com/ ) over Dreamweaver. It's more programmer-oriented than designer-oriented, though, and it doesn't have WYSIWYG, but it has nice FTP support, high productivity and great extendability (there are Eclipse plugins for the weirdest things).

Hi,
Firstly if you're looking for opensource app replacements you can always try www.osalt.com.

Personally I'd try:
Photoshop: GIMP or GIMPShop or Krita
Illustrator: Inkscape or XaraXtreme
InDesign: scribus
Dreamweaver: KompoZer or Aptana or seamonkey or Amaya or href="http://net2.com/nvu/">NVU

I also found this website which might help: www.thefreesuite.com

Here are the relevant OSalt links:
photoshop
illustrator
indesign
dreamweaver

If you are looking for an excellent web-oriented IDE, I highly recommend Aptana Studio. It's available as an Eclipse plugin, or, if you are like me and just want Aptana, as a standalone app (Eclipse pre-built with Aptana modules).

It has excellent support for most of the JavaScript libraries out of the box (as well as PHP, Ruby, and more), and you can add SVN and other features through plugins. (The JavaScript editor can even run a trimmed-down version of jslint over your code in real time.) The paid version adds SFTP support.

Combine all that with a very powerful syncing tool, and my productivity has literally doubled (or tripled).

I have nothing to do with the company, but having switched from DreamWeaver (I know, I know... well, I was used to CFStudio/HomeSite+ before I switched away from Windows), I was very impressed with it.

Aptana's Website

I saw this. It requires you to install an engine to your web server (like Tomcat).
http://aptana.com/jaxer

This might be a stupid question but what about using the iphone mobile web app support in Aptana? Has anyone used that? Is it any good? No, it's not an app running natively on the iphone but do your users really care?

When I got in the web-dev business I started with Dreamweaver. Not because it was all that good, but everybody I knew (and thought was a "pro" web-designer/developer) used it, and loved it. In the beginning I started as an all-in-one web developer, meaning I've done the server side programming, client side HTML and CSS, and the occasional JavaScript.

Couple of years passed away since then, and I now absolutely don't want to use Dreamweaver at all. Why? Because I do not create static sites anyway, PHP support is worth shit (no autocomplete, no outlining, etc.), the HTML autocomplete feature just doesn't cut it for me (it works, sort of, but not the way I like it; it doesn't prevent you from introducing not-valid-for-the-doctype attributes, etc.). The only good things, which I do liked was the integrated FTP support (but no version control support of any kind), and the CSS editing mode (I could edit the CSS rule from the HTML file and the modifications were saved in the external CSS file, linked to the HTML file).

Since then, I use Aptana Studio, and I absolutely love it. It has all I need. It works good with PHP, Ruby, HTML, CSS, JavaScript (actually this is awesome, very good quality). It has FTP, SFTP support. It has version control support (CVS, SVN, GIT, maybe more). And a very big plus: it has support for the most popular JavaScript libraries (autocomplete and all), like: jQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, MooTools, EXTjs, Dojo, etc.

And to top it all, it has integrated support for online deployment to the cloud (Aptana Cloud) where you can have a hosting plan and deployment done with a few clicks right from Aptana Studio.

Oh, and did I mention the server-side JavaScript AJAX server, Jaxer?

It beats Dreamweaver hands down any minute.

Aptana Studio community edition is one that incorporates 'Jaxer' that uses serverside javascript, and addresses code completion/syntax checking.

I'm surprised no one so far mentioned Aptana Studio. It provides decent syntax highlighting, autocomplete, has support for a dozen popular libraries and a very good debugger that integrates Firebug with the Eclipse debugging framework. Plus, it has some neat features for web development such as the CSS autocomplete that indicates for which browsers each property is available.

Aptana Jaxer goes the opposite way: use Javascript to do everything, both on client side and server side.

I don't know about netbeans, but there is an Eclipse-based web IDE called Aptana which comes with just about every JS library I've heard of - jQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, Dojo, ExtJS & YUI, to name a few.
It supports a range of serverside platforms too (ruby, python, php etc).
Is that the kind of thing you're thinking of?

There is nothing innovative in Chrome.

Oh god, why am I feeding this troll?
V8 kicks every other JS implementation in the pants.
I'm going to see if I can use it for server-side stuff a la jaxer.

• Client-side only

Clearly you haven't heard of Jaxer.

For those of you interested in a dark color scheme for Eclipse/Aptana/RadRails (for Ruby on Rails development), here it is. Another one can be found here.

I use the http://aptana.com/ eclipse distribution for web development. Its great for PHP, RoR, JavaScript, HTML, etc. But I don't see it mentioned anywhere

While it's hard to disagree that python would be ideal for both client-side and server-side, I think you probably realize that realistically that's not going to happen anytime soon. With that said, there certainly is the possibility to use javascript on both ends, via server-side options like jaxer ( http://www.aptana.com/jaxer ), helma ( http://dev.helma.org/ ), or maybe even JScript.net if you're stuck on windows.

I think you'll find that this latest version (2.0) of javascript is very pythonic, with its array comprehensions that are a lot like Python's list comprehensions.

As an aside, you're not still writing SQL queries are you? Almost every web dev platform out there has that abstracted nowadays... SQLAlchemy is a great choice for python...

Easy way to get a functional eclipse setup for PHP and web development:

Go here to get the Yoxos Eclipse distro (I like this one because it does the best job of finding your dependencies for you).

http://ondemand.yoxos.com/geteclipse/start

In plugin explorer, search for and schedule PDT, SQL Explorer, and either Subclipse or whatever is compatible with your versioning software.

Click Start Download, and then unzip and copy the eclipse directory to somewhere suitable.

Meanwhile, go here:

http://www.aptana.com/studio/download

And click on the Eclipse Plugin tab and download the plugin.

Then open Eclipse, go to the workbench, and in the menu, do Help > Software Updates > Find and Install, then choose to Search for New Features to Install, then choose install from archive and point it at the plugin you just downloaded. It will tell you it needs to restart afterward.

Now you have a functional IDE, and you can use Window > Show View > Other to choose whatever panels you want to have open in your workspace. I mix and match Aptana and PDT.

Last but not least, you need the Zend Debugger. Do Help > Software Updates > Find and Install, then do Help > Software Updates > Find and Install, then choose to Search for New Features to Install, then choose New Remote Site. For Name, put Zend Debugger, and for URL, put http://downloads.zend.com/pdt. Make sure that site is checked in the list, then click Finish and it will search for your debugger. Find it, install it, then do go here:

http://www.thierryb.net/pdtwiki/index.php?title=Using_PDT_:_Installation_:_Installing_the_Zend_Debugger#Installing_Zend_Debugger_client

And follow whatever directions are consistent with the platform you're using.

I haven't used it myself, however Aptana Studio has been recommended to me. It's based off Eclipse and does CSS, JS, HTML, PHP, RoR it has a JSON editor and has a bunch of Ajax libraries built in.

I'm actually using Eclipse to write a Rails app (radrails: http://www.aptana.com/), with SVN integrated into Eclipse to manage it (subversive: http://www.eclipse.org/subversive/).

Odd, mine (Europa + WTP) loads up with projects and plugins and all at 104,324 K in Windoze. 300 is more for when you dive in... First of all, you should get the mustang JDK for Java SE 6 from Sun. Then if you're just going to make some simple java app, you could get Eclipse IDE for Java Developer's here: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/ If you're into web based development, you'd be wiser to go here (Red Hat Developer Studio - basically Europa + WTP + extra stuff in an easy package): http://www.redhat.com/developers/rhds/index.html If you're not actually a programmer, and want to make some pretty html/css with eclipse, there's always Aptana: http://www.aptana.com/ ... which you could also use as a perspective for developing a normal app.

... is a reasonable OSS replacement for Dreamweaver.

As a complete amateur I have enjoyed Nvu for its interface.

other alternatives may be
http://www.aptana.com/download_all.php
http://www.inkscape.org/ (quite good, but haven't used it for web applications)
http://kompozer.net/

ZDNet has an article on that very subject.

Off Topic part:

You know, people mope about not being able to code in an environment that resembles the simple / effective style of Ataris and C64s from our childhood...

But they forget that they have a complete and flexible language interpreter staring them in the face.

Install Firebug. It has a nice REPL console. Combine it with a simple text editor[1] and you have a complete programming environment in two windows that is :

      a) Familiar (every kid doing this will be using a web browser anyway)
      b) Relevant and Flashy (being able to do the cool web stuff that's apparently cool now)
      c) Good - Javascript is actually a really nice language (it's been described as Scheme with C/C++ syntax), which is very easy to work with, and nothing other than the web page in the way.
      d) Did I mention Familiar? Web pages are not perceived as complex or threating.

On Topic part:

The reason you thought the circle was cool was that a) you came up with it when you were a kid, and b) you understood the math behind it.

Given that, the goal would be to get your kids interested in the math -- Computer Science is really just a form of math, so if you had been doing math problems, and showed him that if you graphed ( x, y ) = ( r cos t, r sin t ) made a circle, then he might find it interesting. Or he may not, and that's fine too. But I've been doing math with my son in one form or another for two years now, and he's still only 5.

But really, unless you care, a circle is just boring.

[1] or Aptana, if you're brave...

A great, open-source IDE with full FireFox debugging support: http://aptana.com/ and http://aptana.tv/

hullabalucination: Check out aptana http://www.aptana.com/ for the implementation phase. It has a preview tab so you can tweak your CSS and html and get pretty fast feedback. Even better, it has CSS/HTML/JS auto completion so you don't have to switch back and forth between your different files as often.

I didn't try it yet but check this out:

http://www.aptana.com/