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Netbeans [1] and Eclipse [2] provide a fully functional C++ Integrated Development environment - and work on Windows too. Sure they might not work for *everyone* but they might both very well be on par with Dev-C++ and you know they are continuously extending the functionality of both projects. If you tried it in the past, it might be worth checking it out again:

[1] http://www.netbeans.org/features/cpp/
[2] http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/

For PHP work, Eclipse with the PHP Development Tools (PDT) package is quite nice. Though from what I hear Netbeans may be a bit ahead for PHP these days -- the latest version has complete PHP support built in.

The first thing that comes to my mind is Eclipse CDT: http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/
  It has been around for quite a while, it's mature, frequently updateted, build on top of Eclipse.. definitely worth a try, unless you want to work on a pc with little memory - it's java, so it will need lots of it.

I use Eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/ for all my IDE needs. I have found that it works well on any platform (and with any language) that I find myself sitting behind (or coding in). Eclipse gets my vote mainly for its very wide language AND platform support.

Eclipse VE??? Nothing like it. Java + Eclipse is a marriage made in heaven.

The Eclipse Visual Editor hasn't been updated since January 2007 and doesn't work with Eclipse 3.3 or newer. With 3.5's release about a month away, that's unacceptable.

If you look at big companies like IBM who have really embraced OSS, they have done so precisely because of the GPL.

Which is, of course, how come when you look at big IBM open source projects like Eclipse, they decided to release it under the GPL. Oh... wait... no they didn't. Guess you're just talking crap.

Frankly I'm surprised to hear of such blatant FUD coming from someone like ESR.

It isn't FUD. Every business I've worked in in the last ten years has been wary of using GPL code in their own projects, internal or otherwise. I've even had some express concerns about using gcc as the compiler on their projects (although thirty minutes of going over the situation with their lawyer helped them relax). None have ever been bothered by the idea of using BSD or Apache licensed projects in them.

If you want business adoption of a project, particularly if you're talking about a library and/or development tool, Apache/BSD licensing is definitely the way to go. If you want to retain control, sure, GPL is better, but you have to understand that you're likely to put off at least some businesses who may otherwise adopt it.

See, this is where the fanboys fall down frothing at the mouth. For starters, I have to be able to use Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.

No, I think this is fanboyism. Though not everyone can, many people are able to use GIMP or CinePaint to replace Photoshop. Actually when I've said before that GIMP was not a drop-in replacement for Photoshop I've gotten a bunch of replies just as sarcastic as yours. I've been wanting to start a photography business and I will try CinePaint to see if it will work for me before I spend money on Photoshop. Actually I did try it on my Mac however the Mac version is not native instead it requires X11 and I wasn't able to get it to work. So I may install Ubuntu on my Mac so I can test CinePaint. For Illustrator I'll try Inkscape first. If I wanted to do desktop publishing, I have no plan to, I'd try Scribus before I got InDesign.

No it may end up I need CS4 because they won't work for me but they do work for plenty of others and I am willing to try this.

Now, I have to use those because all my peers throughout the industry are going to be using those same exact tools.

Peer pressure is no reason you have to use them. Open source software can save in the same file formats and are capable of some of the same things, even if differently, as Adobe products in many cases.

When a firm hires me to do work for them, they expect me to be able to use the defacto tools for the trade.

And you want to work for them? It shouldn't matter to clients what you use as long as you do the job in the tyme specified.

Next up, games.

I don't play games but if I ever do I can go to Yahoo! Games. I did buy some game CDs but that was before 2000.

Development. Sorry, no substitute for XCode on Linux.

I have yet to use XCode on my Mac though I do use Eclipse which is cross platform. Now if I ever try Objective-C I may try XCode but I'd rather program in C/C++. If you look at this thread I do ask another programmer about whether Objective-C is cross platform.

If I'm writing apps for OS X or the iPhone, guess what?, you need OS X and an iPhone simulator.

I don't disagree but as may be concluded from above I want to program cross platform, Linux, OS X, and Windows.

You substitute cranks are all the same. You see some one complain about Linux not having the par software, and hold up a supposed equivalent which (most of the time) not only pales in comparison, but is outright inferior to the defacto standard tool.

And fanboys are all the same, they cry an open source alternative won't work but they fail to try or to say why. If this isn't you, explain exactly why these alternatives will not work.

Falcon

Furthermore... they seem to be trying to patent what TopLink was already doing prior to 1996.

For those who care, TopLink has now been opensourced as EclipseLink

The Eclipse Process Framework is designed explicitly to design and document processes. It ties together disciplines, processes, roles, domains, work products, guidance, and tools. It's extensible. It comes with OpenUP, a lean open-source process library based on RUP. You can start with OpenUP and modify it to meet your needs, or you can write your own from scratch.

It can run error checks to make sure that you have tied up all your loose ends, so that you don't end up with a process that produces some piece of work but nobody was assigned to create it.

You can publish it as a static web site, or as a web app (wrapped in a WAR file.)

Just download it. It's free, Open Source, and based on Eclipse, of course. Go through a tutorial and you'll go "wow - this is exactly what I asked Slashdot for."

An other version would be to run your IDE from your netbook but alias make to "ssh make" or using a well configured distcc. The last point would be transfering datas. Two options are available here. Either you rsync them to the server, or you mount the code directory on your local machine using ssh, fuse and sshfs

Mounting via NFS or SMB is generally dog slow and not recommended. Using an intelligent IDE like Eclipse that wants to parse and index all your source code, and trying to do that on a mounted drive is going to make things even worse as it crawls through every single file in your source tree.

A better solution is an IDE that leaves the files where they are, and offloads all the heavy lifting to that machine, where disk accesses are fast, or are at least fast compared to sending everything over the wire.

I mentioned this in another post, but due to my screwup of not applying good formatting to that one, I'll repost it here, as it's just as relevant. (mods, please ignore the other one)

Shameless plug... I work on an Eclipse project (Remote Development Tools aka RDT) that allows you to have a local Eclipse that targets a C/C++ project that lives on the remote machine. No SMB or NFS mounting required, nor do you have to deal with the slowness of running Eclipse over X. Nor do you have to run your IDE in a browser. The UI runs natively on your local machine, so all that nice stuff like copy/paste and drag n' drop just works (mostly..).

When you do something such as build your project (e.g. "make all", but it can be whatever you wish), the build commands are sent to the remote machine via the remote protocol of your choice. This can be via SSH if that's what you want. The output of the build is populated back to the local machine over the wire, and errors and warnings in your code are mapped onto those remote files so you can do lovely things such as clicking on the errors and being taken to the right location in that file.

If you want all the whizz-bang features like intelligent search, content assist, call hierarchy, etc. to work in a secure environment then tunnel the mandatory dstore connection over SSH, or setup SSL (I'd recommend the SSH tunnel route).

Here are the release notes for our first release. I'd recommend downloading the latest 2.1.1 nightly build over the 2.1 build to get some key bug fixes.

Shameless plug... I work on an Eclipse project (Remote Development Tools aka RDT) that allows you to have a local Eclipse that targets a C/C++ project that lives on the remote machine. No SMB or NFS mounting required, nor do you have to deal with the slowness of running Eclipse over X. When you do something such as build your project, the build commands are sent to the remote machine via the remote protocol of your choice. This can be via SSH if that's what you want. If you want all the whizz-bang features like intelligent search, content assist, call hierarchy, etc. to work in a secure environment then tunnel the mandatory dstore connection over SSH, or setup SSL (I'd recommend the SSH tunnel route). Here are the release notes for our first release. I'd recommend downloading the latest 2.1.1 nightly build over the 2.1 build to get some key bug fixes.

GIMP and Paint.NET aren't as good as Photoshop
Inkscape isn't as good as Illustrator
VLC isn't as good as The KMPlayer
Songbird isn't as good as foobar2000, Xion, Winamp or iTunes
Jahshaka isn't as good as Premiere or Media Composer
Blender isn't as good as Maya, 3D Studio or LightWave 3D
GCC isn't as good as Visual Studio

Try comparing apples with apples.

GIMP 2.6 and later is as capable as Photoshop. It now has 32-bit colourspces even. Considering that Photoshop is about $800, and GIMP is $0 ... you are really going to be scratching here to find a reason why one should use Photoshop in preference.

If you don't like the GIMP UI ... try Krita.

> Inkscape isn't as good as Illustrator

Debateable. Inkscape is pretty good, and getting better all the time.

> VLC isn't as good as The KMPlayer

Ok ... so use KMPlayer then. It is available for Linux.
http://kmplayer.kde.org/

Oh sorry ... did you mean this one?
http://kmplayer.en.softonic.com/

Meh. A Winamp clone. They are a dime a dozen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacious_Media_Player

> Songbird isn't as good as foobar2000, Xion, Winamp or iTunes

OK, you don't like Songbird? ... so use Amarok then ... the very best software for your media collection ... and it supports iPods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarok_(software)
http://amarok.kde.org/
http://amarok.kde.org/en/screenshots

> Blender isn't as good as Maya, 3D Studio or LightWave 3D

You are kidding, surely? Blender is the best by far ... I have heard however that because of the exceedingly poor support for OpenGL on Windows, Blender doesn't run very well on that platform. So do it like Pixar and others do it ... run Blender on Linux.

> GCC isn't as good as Visual Studio

How do you figure that? GCC is the premier compiler set in the world. It targets more architectures, and handles more software langauges, than any other compiler.

Did you mean an Indetgrated Development Environment, perhaps?

Try Eclipse then.

http://www.eclipse.org/

Or perhaps something like Kdevelop in conjunction with Qt designer is more to your taste:
http://www.kdevelop.org/
http://www.qtsoftware.com/products/appdev

Really, if you are going to compare applications, at least choose comparable ones. Oh, and if you want to run decent applications at good speed, then it would help immensely if you weaned yourself off of Windows.

As for *good* open source games, try these:
http://ubuntulinuxhelp.com/top-12-best-games-for-ubuntu-linux-1-tremulous/

http://rangit.com/software/top-8-linux-games-of-2007/

Enjoy.

Pick any of:

http://www.kdevelop.org/
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/index.html
http://www.eclipse.org/
Borland's

etc...

A standard isn't software; it's how to exchange information. That includes data formats, but also includes protocols and an awful lot of context. The standards work is a big job, and people have been working on it for years (see HL7). As eln points out below, it's boring as hell, but that doesn't make it unimportant. The industry has been in the process of moving from HL7 v.2 to v.3 for about a decade now.

If you want to get into the software part of the solution, have a look at the OHF Project. There are others, but that's a starting place.

I agree with tnk on the benign reason; the system as a whole will save money, but which individual players will save how much? Hospitals already spend very little on IT compared with other businesses, so spending a big whack that may end saving money for some insurance company isn't going to happen.

You want one big reason for doing this? If it can free up nurses from doing secretarial work chasing down documents in the mail and phoning around, it just might keep enough staff at the hospitals to serve the public. The U.S. department of health and human services prepared this report on the subject. It's worth reading.

If you are into eclipse RCP I would recommend Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-Ins
And then there is this superb newsgroup.
For algorithms I found "Algorithms in C" by Robert Sedgewick very useful.

I'm afraid you'll probably have to wait until some enterprising 3rd party to grab the source and build some of the technology into a different product.

Don't be afraid anymore - this was actually the plan of the semantic desktop all the time. For instance, a product of the project is http://aperture.sf.net/ which is built-in into http://eclipse.org/SMILA at the moment.

Also, Ansgar Bernardi (the project lead who was interviewed in the TR article) says:

A spinoff company is also in the works...

well, I really hope this spinnoff company works out! ;-)

I've done ARM7 development in the past. I've just started a new ARM7 project after a four year hiatus. What seems to have changed the most is the availability of cheap hardware debug tools such as cheap FTDI FT2232 based JTAG pods.

I'm also interested to see what comes of Eclipse's DSDP initiative.

http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/dsdp-charter.php

I've always thought the Balkanization of the debug hardware was one of the major barriers in the wider circulation of open hardware.

Concerning the Adweebo, I've programmed this chip before using the free download (for Windows) AVR Studio. What an amazing tool. Despite the AVR having a dedicated hardware call stack, this thing can't even display a call stack.

Nor can it display local variables for call frames up the stack. The upshot of this is that if you have a complicated protocol subroutine that calls get_byte() which blocks waiting for the next byte of input from USART or SPI/TWI (as slave), then whenever you break the program (yes, you must break the program for AVR Studio to display *anything*) you'll inevitably end up looking at the local variables of get_byte() which won't be interesting, while all the variables you wish to inspect in the calling routine are unwatchable.

In another nod to genius, whenever you break execution under AVR Studio, it changes focus to the source code tab where the execution happens to break. Even if you just had your cursor on the variable you wished to watch, or the line of code where you wished to add a break point, neither of which can be done while the program is running. Breaking the program changes your view, and then you have to find it again among twenty or so tabs you might have open.

I've never managed to develop much proficiency with GDB. I expect my new project will finally cure that. Generally I write my code so that I don't spend time debugging at that level.

It's nice to see prebuilt packages such as Yagarto where the GDB to random JTAG-of-the-month debug interface is pre-configured, and you're not forced to invest $700 in a "professional" level debug pod to get debug features that we really ought to take for granted in this day and age.

Also, I can't sign off without coughing up a hairball to describe the modalities of the Atmel debugWire interface. Bluuurp. There, that feels better.

ECF home, articles at IBM DeveloperWorks, InfoQ.

From the latter: ECF is...

• Real-time communication and collaboration features for teams using Eclipse such as peer-to-peer file sharing, remote opening of Eclipse views, screen capture sharing, and real-time shared editing.
• A set of communications APIs and frameworks built upon existing protocols (like Google Talk, XMPP, SSH, HTTP/HTTPS, Rendevous, IRC, and others) for developers to add communications and messaging to their own Equinox-based plugins, or customize and extend the ECF applications.

Or a plug in to eclipse

You mean, like this one (which is funded by Microsoft)?

Screenshots

As one of their two demos, they show how you can use the GUI to add an Amazon EC2 instance "in only five minutes" -- as opposed to typing one (1) command or using Amazon's own ElasticFox.

At the Eclipse Foundation, I believe the lawyer types spend most of their time doing due-diligence on contributions coming into the project.

I'm not sure if this applies to OSS in general, but in Eclipse at least, version numbers actually have some semantic meaning assigned to them.

In this case, you come to a place where you have both a "marketing" version and a "real" version. Hence the trend of naming major releases instead of giving them specific versions.

ECF is an integrated Jabber (XMPP)-based protocol that allows collaborative work. Introduction here. "Real-time communication and collaboration features for teams using Eclipse such as peer-to-peer file sharing, remote opening of Eclipse views, screen capture sharing, and real-time shared editing."

Other Jabber products you might find useful are Coccinella with whiteboarding, etc.

Full disclosure - I am a founder of a startup that develops an open source automated trading platform targeted at institutional investors.

As was mentioned in above postings, there are a series of open source tools available to bootstrap your trading system development:

• QuickFIX and QuickFIX/J (I'm also a developer of QFJ project) - a C++ and Java open source implementations of the FIX protocol, the underlying standard protocol for connectivity between financial institutions. Think of it as the HTTP of finance.
• QuantLib - an open source risk analytics package
• Esper - an open source complex event processing engine
• EclipseTrader - Eclipse-based open source trading GUI that's targeted more at retail investors
• ActiveMQ and AMQP and Qpid for messaging (AMQP standard was initially contributed by JPMorgan)

And then of course there's my company Marketcetera - we build on top of a lot of the tools mentioned above and others (ActiveMQ, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, QFJ, etc) to provide the basic underlying platform that institutional traders (think quantitative hedge funds) can use to build their proprietary algorithms and start trading. After implementing a few trading systems in a row ourselves for various trading firms we realized that there was an obvious need for an open source trading platform so that people wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel and write systems from scratch every single time.

To answer the OP's question about which commercial firms use FOSS: - a lot of proprietary trading software is implemented on top of OSS - JPMorgan famously built their trading GUI [PDF] on top of Eclipse, and Progress Apama is built on top of Eclipse RCP as well.

Not surprisingly, most trading applications are very Windows-heavy (although quite a few companies have Linux clusters, and some exchanges run on Linux as well). Most of the apps that your broker will provide for you to trade with are Windows-only (such as Bloomberg, Goldman Redi, MicroHedge, etc), and a lot of the APIs available from vendors are .NET or COM components and nothing else. We implement our systems mostly in Java (including the Eclipse RCP), thought have connectors for some of the Windows-specific components.

We know that flexibility is at the heart of any powerful trading application, and we think the open-source model maximizes the ability of our users to control the application. Some think the open-source model is antithetical to the secretive finance industry, but we see it as the perfect fit.

Here's what I have discovered through blood, sweat, and tears:

* Use Eclipse 3.3.2 (instead of 3.4.x -- I found 3.4 to be VERY unstable with PyDEV -- and the debug shell doesn't work)
* Use PyDev 1.3.20 (or later)
* GET Pydev Extensions -- it's well worth the $42 (gives you an interactive debug shell and PyLint integration)
* Virtual Word Wrap (it should be built in, but is not).

I've found that its best to NOT let Eclipse copy files to its "workspace" directory -- force it to use the existing files. I have adopted the habit of taking regular tarball backups of the workspace directory (and files I'm editing). Be sure you set your PYTHONPATH properly in your debug configuration, turn on line numbering and display of whitespace characters.

Unfortunately, I haven't found any IDE that is as mature and complete. If you must use something else, I recommend Geany. WingIDE is also good, but lacks support for Projects, sophisticated debug configurations, etc.

Eclipse with PyDev work fine for me.

What tool are you speaking about?

It is part of Eclipse TPTP. TPTP also does profiling and other stuff. It is useless to add your own code to an app to debug leaks even if you are a C programmer, where tools like valgrind can find leaks.

1. Get a copy of Head First Java .
2. Download the latest version of Java.
3. Download Netbeans or Eclipse (I prefer Netbeans, but I use Eclipse at the office, and I don't have a problem recommending either one). Make sure you get a version that includes either Glassfish (Netbeans) or Tomcat (Eclipse), so you can run some servlets.
4. Start going through the book. You'll learn the Java syntax and conventions in the first part, then learn about web development. Since you've got web development experience, you can probably skip a lot of the intro (web apps use the HTTP request/response cycle, are stateless unless you stick stuff in the session, etc.) and dig into some JSPs.
5. Once you can get data from the browser to the server, pick up JDBC and stick it in the database. If you've used ODBC with VB, then you'll have no trouble picking up JDBC.
6. Pick up a Spring book (I'll recommend Spring in Action) and learn about dependency injection. It's a pretty simple concept, but you'll be amazed what you can do with it.

That should give you enough to get started and maybe even get your first Java gig. Hibernate's good to learn, too, but on most of the projects I've been on, you don't use it in day-to-day development (that is, you don't have to reconfigure or redeploy anything, unless your data model changes). With Spring, just about everything you write will require that you modify a context file or two, so you need to know what's going on.

I started with Eclipse (as I use it for LAMP development) and switched to Tomcat

Ummm, what? Eclipse is an IDE, Tomcat is a container for web servers. Tomcat and Apache can be used with Eclipse with a nice little plugin for testing.

This problem is exactly the reason there are alternatives like the Eclipse Public License. Google has recently announced that they are adding the EPL as a license option for Google Code.

The Eclipse Foundation and the entire Eclipse community are pleased to announce the availability of the Ganymede Release, the annual release train developed by the Eclipse community. The Ganymede Release is a coordinated release of 23 different Eclipse project teams that represents over 18 million lines of code.

IBM didn't write all that code ;)

So, the reason for single returns is that? I would expect 2 things:
1st: cleanup code should be placed in destructors.
2nd: a function shouldn't need cleanup code, it should do only what is meant to do and revert any side efects to the global state.
By the way, let me introduce you to aspect-oriented programming, were the transversal requisites to your program have an identity and are separated from other code. Read more for example in http://www.eclipse.org/aspectj
There is for C/C++ also. :P Google for AspectC++

You can get that in Java too, using the SWT widgets from Eclipse. With a single code base in the application, the widget set will use the OS's native widgets (GTK in GNU/Linux). So Eclipse looks native in each OS, while still remaining consistent across platforms.

Yes, unfortunately, the Visual Editor for Eclipse wasn't updated to work with Eclipse 3.3. I wish I knew why, as it was one of the key plugins that was pushed to work with Eclipse 3.2 prior to its release.

I actually use Subversive, since it is an incubating Eclipse project. However, I may switch to Subclipse if Subversive keeps being sluggish. Also, I tend to be rather conservative about tools upgrades, which means that I often wait for a shaking out period before upgrading, and I certainly don't use release candidates. :-)

If the market would be dead no one would be buying software tools which is simply bogus. Just look at IDEA and the way they still manage to expand despite the heated competition from both NetBeans as well as Eclipse. So dead? Nonsense.
Only real change I do see is that its getting harder and harder to become a new serious player on the market since it would take quite the investment. Its cheaper to develop something through an open source project than to hire your own programmers.
But depending on the license being used its even cheaper to fork an IDE project, add your own super-duper extensions to it and try to sell that. Or hasn't anyone looked into that option because they gave up prior to actually trying?

uh. i'd rather use that open source ide eclipse for java development. You know, Java, the .

(In fact, IBM's commitment to Eclipse is so strong of late that some people feel they've become dominant in the project, which is a bit of a sticky political situation for them.)

<kneejerk>You mean they've wrenched control of the platform from the original developers?!!!</kneejerk>

No, it really is written in Eclipse (although not necessarily using Eclipse).

A DSL router will allow you to connect all three computers to the internet at the same time. It seems like it would be very slow with three sharing but it is not. This is your best answer if you can do it. Is your provider cellular though? That is trickier because a router won't work with cellular. It is much easier to connect your Linux computer to a router than to the DSL modem.

About Dosbox I can't help you. When I want a DOS box, I build a DOS box. It's been a long time since I felt the urge to do that though.

Linuxquestion.org has forums tutorials and many other helpful things. You can also get help at Ubuntu forums.

For programming C++ I think the best reference is the book by Stroustrup. You might want to combine that with the C standard library tutorial and reference. These are mostly references to have when you really need to do something. When you master these books you will have a good understanding of C++.

For an easy introduction or to meet specific fields of interest you might try C++ In-Depth Series.

As you learn C++ you will want a good editor or integrated development environment. I like Eclipse. Don't download it from there though. Get it from the Add Programs in your menu -- that one has other stuff you can add to your C++ environment too and they're customized for your specific version of Ubuntu. Always look there first.

It was the helpful people on the comment forums that got me started on my way oh so long ago. I wish you luck. When you see how free you are to do stuff with it I think you'll see why people are so enthusiastic about it.

In addition to what FooAtWFU already nailed dead-on: because the Eee is a PC. You know, fully unlocked and runs anything that you could run on a PC.

This isn't about ideology wars. It's purely pragmatic. I want to do stuff like load Eclipse on it, and type code while on the train. Or any other program that I already know from the PC. Even if a PDA sorta-equivalent exists, maybe I can't be arsed to learn it, when I already have a perfectly good program that I'm familiar with.

In that vein, I plan to buy an Eee for mom (once I can actually find one in stock that is), and pack whatever programs she uses to process her photos on it. I never got into the whole digital photo thing, but she seems to have, big time, and methinks it would make a nice birthday present if she could take it with her on the road. Roll that around in your head. Not some "well, it sorta almost does the same thing if you learn the totally different interface" kind of thing, but the exact same that she already knows and is comfortable with.

I want to be able to plug whatever PC peripherals I have around into it. Like, for example, the Wacom tablet. (It's a damn good wireless, battery-less, ball-less and led-less mouse. And the stylus is nice for graphics too.)

Basically, if you can live with the restricted selection of software that PDAs typically have, more power to you. I won't try to convert you. But some of us would rather have a small PC than a PDA. Different class of tool, really.

You forgot to mention a few: Eclipse and all its subprojects
Linux kernel
MinGW
Octave
Scilab
R
Blender
povray
Ogre 3D
ogg vorbis + tools
Sun's Java compiler and libraries
Mono (C#)
Wine
X Windows
mplayer (linux)
KDE
GNOME
Slashcode
virtualbox
bochs
Nokia opensource projects

Gawd, nobody wants frigging Java anywhere near anything they have to actually use, much less *pay* to use. Has anybody, anywhere EVER had a positive user experience with a Java app?

hate to break this to you, but much of the software you run on your typical cellphone is written in Java. I have quite a few positive java apps on my blackberry

not to mention, if you use ebay, you're using a Java-based web app. I hear it's a pretty decent piece of software.

oh, and I have a daily (mostly) positive experience with Eclipse.

The idea that "java apps are obvious due to their slowness and crappiness" is an old, tired adage. It's just false. You might as well say, "C++ apps are obvious due to their memory leaks". Just because you've run some crappy Java code doesn't mean the language itself and all code written in it is crap. It brings you more benefits than you know.

Disclaimer: I do a lot of J2EE coding. I also hate Java, but for more technical reasons. ;-)

I have tried pretty much every PHP-capable IDE/Editor and hands down the best is Nusphere PHPEd (windows only). Zend Studio is very close and Eclipse PDT (the open-source basis of Zend Studio for Eclipse) is getting there, but the intellisense and other features aren't nearly as complete as Zend Studio and PHPEd. I have not tried the official Zend Studio for Eclipse releases since I did not really like PDT.

My impressions come from about 2 years on PHPEd, a few months with PDT and a couple of days with Zend Studio and other products (such as PHPEdit).

Here are some of things that draw me to PHPEd:
- Full intellisense/autocomplete for all PHP code and all of your PHP code from anywhere in your project
- Full parsing of PHPDoc comments
- Multi-line PCRE regex find and replace across files/directories/current project
- SFTP/FTP project mapping like "Sites" in Dreamweaver
- DB console that works with SQLite, MySQL, Postgre, MSSQL, Oracle and others
- Full debugger, local web server, code performance analysis

Zend Studio 5.5 seemed pretty good from my usage (it has a lot of the features PHPEd has), however I disliked a few things:

- It ran on Java which always seems to make apps feel more sluggish
- It requires 1 license per computer, so you can't share your license at home and at work
- It was more expensive that PHPEd

PDT (the basis for the new Zend Studio for Eclipse) was ok, however it had the following issues. Note that these issues will be different if you but Studio for Eclipse since it comes with specific bundled software:

- It took a while to get the interface to a state where I was productive with PHP stuff (be sure to have the right version of the JVM!)
- All of the database interaction was through separate JDBC drivers which were a pain to set up
- The code intellisense/autocompletion did not always work properly and did not fully parse PHPDoc comments

I'm sure this all sounds like an ad for the product, but I just _really_ enjoy using PHPEd.

Judging from some of the activity here, that's probably not a serious question. But let's pretend it is. However, a lot of little Bill fans will get their feelings hurt.

Bill's toy bag is just that, a toy bag, that what little it does is on and for Windows -- only. And it's near a few decades late in coming. A comprehensive answer could go on for pages if you start to include various languages like Java, Python, Perl, C, and Ada. or Tomcat, Lenya, Swish, and many others staples. That's not even counting PHP and PHP-based kit, CPAN and others.

However the press release does not say what the MS "tools" do or, more correctly, claim to do. Students would be more employable playing WoW. For those that have been living in a cave for the last 15 years here's a recap of the main professional tools you will find in industry. There are others, but they're mostly open source, too, except a few big items like Oracle and DB2. None are MS.

IDEs

• Netbeans
• Eclipse
• Emacs - it's underrated
• Kdevelop - it's also underrated

Databases

• MySQL (now Sun)
• Postgresql

GUI toolkits

• Qt (now Nokia)
• GTK+
• wxWidgets

MS has held back computing far too long. The sooner it gets out of the way, the sooner both business and research can get back on track. Bill and his anti-American movement can go take a hike, there's no place for either MS or MS boosters in today's economy.

Let's pretend that's a serious question. Well, the press release does not say what the "tools" do. However, for those that have been living in a cave for the last 15 years here's a recap of the main professional tools you will find in industry. There are others, but they're open source, too, except a few big items like Oracle and DB2.

IDEs

• Netbeans
• Eclipse
• Emacs - it's underrated

Databases

• MySQL
• Postgresql

GUI toolkits

• Qt
• GTK+
• wxWidgets

The list could go on for pages if you start to include various languages like Java, Python, Perl, C, and Ada. or Tomcat, Lenya, Swish, and many others staples. That's not even counting PHP and PHP-based kit. Bill's toy bag is just that, a toy bag, that what little it does is on and for Windows. And it's near a few decades late in coming.

MS has held back computing far too long. The sooner it gets out of the way, the sooner both business and research can get back on track. Bill and his anti-American movement can go take a hike, there's no place for them.

Bah, that's BS. I've used Eclipse and I've used VS and they are equivalent in terms of startup. Eclipse is a wonderful IDE in many ways. One of the things that I love about Eclipse is that it is so multifunctional, due to it's plugin based design. When I do Java coding, I use Eclipse. When I do C++/C coding, I use eclipse. When I do PHP coding, I use Eclipse. When I do HTML/XML coding, I use Eclipse. I even took a class once that required a little Fortran coding and guess what I used? Eclipse!

When you use one IDE for all these languages, you only have to learn how to use one IDE. 'Nough said...

Sounds like that project will be part of Eclipse Higgins? http://eclipse.org/higgins/

Now in my opinion, EPF isn't right for everybody. While the tools are free, it still takes some time to master, as it is quite complex. It doesn't make sense for small organizations that don't have a big budget for this (as mentioned by others, MediaWiki can be quite successful in those cases). But if you want high-quality process documentation, and are willing to put the required effort into it, this is an amazing tool. To get an idea on how the results look like, check out OpenUP - it has been built with these tools. For organizations of a certain size, especially if they aspire ISO 9001 or CMMI certification, this is a good choice. The biggest disadvantage: It doesn't encourage collaboration.

Now in my opinion, EPF isn't right for everybody. While the tools are free, it still takes some time to master, as it is quite complex. It doesn't make sense for small organizations that don't have a big budget for this (as mentioned by others, MediaWiki can be quite successful in those cases). But if you want high-quality process documentation, and are willing to put the required effort into it, this is an amazing tool. To get an idea on how the results look like, check out OpenUP - it has been built with these tools. For organizations of a certain size, especially if they aspire ISO 9001 or CMMI certification, this is a good choice. The biggest disadvantage: It doesn't encourage collaboration.