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I think so too. But I've found that command-line debuggers like gdb invariably show a very limited view of the code, which presents an obstacle for code comprehension.

If you're going to debug with the aim of understanding the code, then using a debugger with a graphical interface is a must. On that regard. I personally find Eclipse CDT very useful, since not only it has a graphical interface to gdb, but also has code navigation abilities which allows you to quickly jump back and forth the function/type definitions and so on.

I think so too. But I've found that command-line debuggers like gdb invariably show a very limited view of the code, which presents an obstacle for code comprehension.

If you're going to debug with the aim of understanding the code, then using a debugger with a graphical interface is a must. On that regard. I personally find Eclipse CDT very useful, since not only it has a graphical interface to gdb, but also has code navigation abilities which allows you to quickly jump back and forth the function/type definitions and so on.

Jazz isn't made by the Rational people. It's made by many of the same people responsible for Eclipse. I used to work with some of them, and I've seen bits and pieces of Jazz as it was under early development.

It looks very promising, especially for large organizations that currently cobble together a suite of collaborative tools by hand. The main promise of it is integration between all those different tools, which will be tighter and smoother than you can get when you use separate tools from separate vendors and try to glue them together into a workable process yourself.

Tis cool. The Eclipse SDK (the Java IDE) is only one Eclipse application. The problem is that most people think of Eclipse as only the IDE application and do not realize that SDK application was originally written to help write other applications for the platform. As for the SDK itself, I agree that there's nothing terribly innovative about it. It's an IDE. It does its job. However, I wasn't really talking about the IDE application. I was more talking about the platform it was built on top of.

The true innovation, in my mind, is the OSGi service model it builds upon. In Eclipse application, everything--including itself--is a plug-in. It's not like most extensible applications where there's a monolithic core application that you can extend off of using some API or scripting language. Because everything is a plug-in and all plug-ins can contribute to and extend other plug-ins, this allows you to do some neat things.

Let's take the game example. Let's say we are writing a peer-to-peer board game system (something I just made up off the top of my head). I write an application (master) plug-in that sets up things how I like it, a peer-to-peer networking plug-in, and a Monopoly plug-in. It needs some preferences, so I simply extend off of an existing preferences plug-in and I have have preferences. The game plays well and all is good. However, we need help pages. I take an existing help plug-in and toss it on. I now have 'Help' on the title bar. I didn't have to change any of my code to add 'Help'. It just works. We also want to have our Monopoly players get the latest updates to the game so I throw in an auto-update plug-in. Now the code will check for updates. Again, the actual Monopoly game is blissfully unaware of all of it. No code changes and it just works.

I release the whole thing into the wild. People love it and want to write their own games. So they write their own plug-ins. Some guy who I don't know wants to write a Risk plug-in for it. He writes his own plug-in that extends off my 'boardgame' plug-in extension point (which is self-documented), leverages the networking plug-in, and releases it. People can then use their update plug-in to discover the new game and have both Monopoly and Risk. It goes without saying that the Risk help pages and preferences will magically appear as well. Thing is, for all this to happen I had to code exactly.... none of it. It all comes as part of the platform, and I would hate to have write any of it from scratch.

If you aren't interested in extensibility or updates or application lifecycle management or service-based component structures, Eclipse is not the best fit for your needs. It's not a panacea. But for what it was designed for, it's top notch.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that there have been other systems that do very similar things. However, its innovation comes in its maturity and sophistication. I recommend reading the OSGi homepage and an Eclipse FAQ.

(Oh yeah, if we later want to put our game on the web, we can do that using the Eclipse Ajax Platform, too).

Tis cool. The Eclipse SDK (the Java IDE) is only one Eclipse application. The problem is that most people think of Eclipse as only the IDE application and do not realize that SDK application was originally written to help write other applications for the platform. As for the SDK itself, I agree that there's nothing terribly innovative about it. It's an IDE. It does its job. However, I wasn't really talking about the IDE application. I was more talking about the platform it was built on top of.

The true innovation, in my mind, is the OSGi service model it builds upon. In Eclipse application, everything--including itself--is a plug-in. It's not like most extensible applications where there's a monolithic core application that you can extend off of using some API or scripting language. Because everything is a plug-in and all plug-ins can contribute to and extend other plug-ins, this allows you to do some neat things.

Let's take the game example. Let's say we are writing a peer-to-peer board game system (something I just made up off the top of my head). I write an application (master) plug-in that sets up things how I like it, a peer-to-peer networking plug-in, and a Monopoly plug-in. It needs some preferences, so I simply extend off of an existing preferences plug-in and I have have preferences. The game plays well and all is good. However, we need help pages. I take an existing help plug-in and toss it on. I now have 'Help' on the title bar. I didn't have to change any of my code to add 'Help'. It just works. We also want to have our Monopoly players get the latest updates to the game so I throw in an auto-update plug-in. Now the code will check for updates. Again, the actual Monopoly game is blissfully unaware of all of it. No code changes and it just works.

I release the whole thing into the wild. People love it and want to write their own games. So they write their own plug-ins. Some guy who I don't know wants to write a Risk plug-in for it. He writes his own plug-in that extends off my 'boardgame' plug-in extension point (which is self-documented), leverages the networking plug-in, and releases it. People can then use their update plug-in to discover the new game and have both Monopoly and Risk. It goes without saying that the Risk help pages and preferences will magically appear as well. Thing is, for all this to happen I had to code exactly.... none of it. It all comes as part of the platform, and I would hate to have write any of it from scratch.

If you aren't interested in extensibility or updates or application lifecycle management or service-based component structures, Eclipse is not the best fit for your needs. It's not a panacea. But for what it was designed for, it's top notch.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that there have been other systems that do very similar things. However, its innovation comes in its maturity and sophistication. I recommend reading the OSGi homepage and an Eclipse FAQ.

(Oh yeah, if we later want to put our game on the web, we can do that using the Eclipse Ajax Platform, too).

This paradigm reminds me of Eclipse. It's not just a Java IDE - it's also a platform on which you can develop any program at all - and because of the wide variety of features and modes, it offers what it calls "perspectives" - your "modes" - to switch among sets of open windows, button bars, and so forth. It is a little confusing at first, even to an experienced computer user, but once the paradigm is clear, it works wonderfully!

And the latest PDT and Pydev make Eclipse the best (free) IDE for PHP and Python development.

OTOH, maybe Eclipse is *really* focusing on the Win32 experience, and the Mac experience is just crappy?

It runs fine on both Win32 and Linux, but yes the Mac experience is crappy. Apple likes to brag about their Java support, but the OS X support for the SWT features needed to fully support Eclipse is spotty. Check out how long the infamous SWT_AWT not implemented bug took for them to resolve. That was a showstopper for a variety of Eclipse plug-ins, and it was open from 6/15/2004 to 4/20/2006. Things are better now, but there's still a subset of SWT_AWT not implemented that breaks some tools, like parts of the fairly popular MyEclipse: see SWT_AWT.new_Shell() unimplemented for that dreary mess, which well over a year old now.

While these specific bugs are unlikely to be the sources of your crashes etc., every time I read up on the state of Eclipse+Mac OS X I find myself distrusting that combination; the base platform seems unstable, and as you can see from these two the bugs that are found can sit for years before being fixed. Recent moves from Apple like pulling Java 6 from Leopard aren't comforting either.

OTOH, maybe Eclipse is *really* focusing on the Win32 experience, and the Mac experience is just crappy?

It runs fine on both Win32 and Linux, but yes the Mac experience is crappy. Apple likes to brag about their Java support, but the OS X support for the SWT features needed to fully support Eclipse is spotty. Check out how long the infamous SWT_AWT not implemented bug took for them to resolve. That was a showstopper for a variety of Eclipse plug-ins, and it was open from 6/15/2004 to 4/20/2006. Things are better now, but there's still a subset of SWT_AWT not implemented that breaks some tools, like parts of the fairly popular MyEclipse: see SWT_AWT.new_Shell() unimplemented for that dreary mess, which well over a year old now.

While these specific bugs are unlikely to be the sources of your crashes etc., every time I read up on the state of Eclipse+Mac OS X I find myself distrusting that combination; the base platform seems unstable, and as you can see from these two the bugs that are found can sit for years before being fixed. Recent moves from Apple like pulling Java 6 from Leopard aren't comforting either.

I would just cite emacs, but since you seem to be interested in something more...graphical...I'll just list these three:

* Eclipse

* KDevelop

* Netbeans

If I HAD a problem with it I wouldn't use it. I know this will shock you to the core, but, for what I use Microsoft products for, they serve me pretty well. My games work, I seldom need to reboot, I have 15 applications open, and the machine's not crapping itself.

I'm working on a Windows machine right now, and the most troublesome piece of software I use on it is fricking FIREFOX, and I am actually considering boycotting it...To the point that I've actually bothered to download the new version of Opera for the first time in god knows how long.

Right now I'm running Eclipse, Putty(x4), Navicat, Reflections, Dreamweaver, MS Management Console, MySQL Query Browser(x2), Outlook, Firefox, and Access 2003. Nothings causing me any problems, I'm on top of all my systems, and I'm satisfied...If I wasn't I'd be using something else.

Apparently though, I'm some kind of intellectual traitor for not being miserable, and not boycotting all these products that aren't making my life a living hell, just because a zealot thinks I should. And yes, if you decide that my using Windows software is symptomatic of the moral decline of the US you're undoubtably a zealot.

People like me, who are comfortable dealing with open and closed source software do more for OSS and the free software movement than all the hairy fanatics who equate closed source with all the evils of the world. If you can't even appreciate that there are legitimate reasons why people use closed source products instead of their OSS competitors, you are NEVER going to create a superior OSS product because you have absolutely no idea of what the POINT of the product actually IS.

The bug detailing this behavior has been changed from WONTFIX to REPOPENED. A look at the comments associated with the bug makes me think that perhaps the eclipse team will indeed fix this.

See here

I can't speak about the rest of Java, but SWT, the GUI toolkit that Eclipse uses, requires you to manually dispose of GUI objects when you're done with them.

Needless to say, this can cause leaks if you're used to Java freeing things up for you. Of course, it helps that SWT disposes of any child objects when you dispose of a parent object... or at least it's supposed to.

Also, I don't see Eclipse having a port to Solaris

http://www.eclipse.org/projects/callisto.php - Visual Editor was part of the Callisto release, but didn't ship "out of the box", but then every IDE has useful features that have to be added.

I wasn't aware that Netbeans was capable of handling Ruby etc properly so I'll have to check it out again - thanks for the pointer!

As an example of how lame eclipse is, it still doesnt have a SWING gui drag and drop canvas painter. Even Visual Age for Java had that.

The user libraries feature is useless for cross-platform development at present, and will stay so until this bug is addressed.

Summary: just about everything in Eclipse can be referenced using workspace or project-relative environment variables. For example, ${project_loc:myProject}/libs could be c:\workspace\myProject\libs on one person's machine, or $home/eclipse/workspaces/this_workspace/myProject/libs on another machine. No problem.

Except for user libraries.

Unique in Eclipse, user libraries (a collection of pre-packaged anythings, eg. jars, shared libraries...whatever, all bundled up for easy inclusion in multiple projects) need to be hard-coded to a particular path. So forget about the example above, it's c:\workspaces\myProject\myUserLib on one platform, and it is on another too. This is a royal pain, means you can't use the same user libraries file on multiple platforms, or even on one platform but on different individual machines.

Marked as P3 at the moment, but without it cross-platform workspaces are just order of magnitude harder than they need to be.

Cheers,
Ian

It's not just Java either. You can use it for PHP or other languages as well.

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/).

Just curious -- any particular reason your wife hasn't tried NeoOffice? (Or have 'yall tried it and found that it didn't work out?)

Also, OOo is mostly C++ -- the java portions are actually in the minority.

Not quite sure how I parse the argument about flexibility making up for a performance difference, unless you're talking about reduced development cost compensating for increased hardware costs (which I can agree with, to a point). Most Java runtimes do at least some level of interpretation from bytecode to machine code. My experience thus far is that other than startup time (and when running code not written by a bonehead, which a great many Java developers are), modern Java (1.4+, using JRockit where appropriate) is actually a decent language with quite good runtime performance (for being garbage-collected and bytecode-based) but with a standard library written by a company that couldn't design a graphics API which is simultaneously usable (which Swing almost is, but AWT is not -- lowest-common-denominator for your widget selection sucks!) and performant (which AWT almost is, but Swing is not -- failing to take advantage of native widgets when they're available sucks!) to save their lives; ironically, the most unsucky Java-centric graphics library I know of is from the Eclipse project, SWT). For the most part, though, I've even gotten to the point of forgiving Sun for not providing an interface to the select() call in earlier versions -- and forgiveness for that takes some doing.

That said -- Java-the-language is certainly not built around flexibility (yes, you've got introspection, but it's much more out-of-your-way to use than in newer languages -- and the number of lines of code needed to get something done is frequently more than it should be), but it's not even remotely the only one targeting the JVM. I've had much fun with JVM-targeted Scheme implementations (Scheme's biggest weakness, after all, is the unstandardized and frequently useless runtime library), and really really wish Jython would get its legs back (which maybe it's doing -- I see they've finally gotten 2.2 out the door). (That said, the bytecode-targeted language I'm having the most fun with when I get playtime is Boo -- it borrows Python's good ideas, adds in several more of its own, but targets the .NET CLR and so is a little off-topic for this thread).

A bigger problem is Java developers being taught to do things in ways which are trendy but not performant -- such as using threading in cases where asynchronous calls from a smaller number of threads makes more sense. Part of this is because the language itself forced people to do things that way until it was improved (things like NIO being introduced), and part of this is because of people coming to Java without experience playing outside the JVM's sandbox and thus having a good idea of what's involved in terms of the work the JVM and OS and the hardware have to do to actually run the code they're writing...

...but anyhow, I've been rambling, and will stop now. Suffice to say that, though, that Java itself has its share of warts, but nonetheless has been at least somewhat unfairly maligned.

There is no diffinitive "this is eclipse, click here to download"

Insightful? While the great Java Development Plugin made Eclipse famous, the C/C++ Tools are now in a state that make Eclipse one of the best C++ IDEs around. They get released the same time as new versions of eclipse, and together with other plugins (Bugzilla Integration etc.) you get a very very powerful dev tool.

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.

Eclipse 3.3 (Europa) really sped up the autocomplete features... Here's a little review of it. http://rf2-dev.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!33114F6710 97246!136.entry and the europa site: http://www.eclipse.org/europa/

eclipse

netbeans (recently revamped, much better than before)

codeblocks

I also like IDE's, with context sensitive help, and class completion and all the other things they do.

Honestly not trying to flame you here, but have you tried Eclipse? Am pretty sure it does what you need: for Java anyway, it certainly has basic support (syntax highlighting etc.) for other languages like C/C++ and PHP too. If you're into .NET there's Monodevelop, which is an IDE for that.

The Society of Humans Against Discrimination Of Werewolves (SHADOW) filed an official complaint against the second full moon in a year that's being unproperly withheld from its members.

The first court of Tuscaloosa, Alabama therefore decided to forbid the entity called Eclipse to go through with this manifestation.

De gustibus not dispu^H^H^H^Hblah, blah, blah. But You know - I could hardly consider development environment something without support of unit-testing built-in (don't tell me about VSTS). I could sacrifice all graphical wizards for single one feature of Eclipse IDE which is not available in VS.NET (without third party plugins) - live compilation together with quick fixes. To give You feeling, when I have a bug it is immediately highlighted (no save no magic keystrokes). Not only this but also I can see *ALL* dependent resources as "invalid". I sut, the, simply press CTRL+1 I usually get useful quick fixes offered by IDE. Such as: surround with try catch, initialize plus dozen other. See Quick Fixes in Eclipse. Of course there is much more juicy details unavailable in VS. Light years ahead refactorisation, far, far better auto-complete (in VS.NET is just a toy, nothing comparable to eclipse), excellent support for team-programming - just two words - Mylar and Team support - show me something comparable to structural diffs in VS.NET. Should I write more? VS.NET is just below average IDE, with lot's of useless Wizards You will never use in real life, but lacking some *crucial* thing others have for Years. I could bet, I can write comparable java webapp without fancy wizards faster than You wit those wizards...

eclipse can switch to c/c++ among many others, sniff around http://www.eclipse.org/

Ive just started using it, probably overkill in the extreme for me but its very nice and works out of the box for gcc.

wow I dunno I mean maybe you could use a proper toolkit like http://www.eclipse.org/swt/

For Item #1:
  Java 3D, in applet form no doubt:
      Java3D API: http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/3D/forDeve lopers/J3D_1_3_API/j3dapi/index.html
      Java3D Applets: http://www.garybeene.com/3d/3d-j3d.htm

For Item #2:
  Native GUI Widgets in Java:
      http://www.eclipse.org/swt/

For Item #3:
  Java Web Browser: http://html.xamjwg.org/java-browser.jsp

Well, Eclipse is a major step in the right direction, despite its shortcomings (the structure of the SWT library and its limitations in comparision w/ Swing, its bulk, etc.).

When you program Eclipse RCP applications, you don't just spend less time fudging around w/ GUI widgets and more time plugging in large chunks of functionality provided to you (for free) in the framework. Tasks that would have taken me months alone have been shortened up to a matter of weeks...

There's a list of a few here.

The best known example is Eclipse.

Short answer: Java GUIs still look like crap compared to native GUIs (or Qt, for that matter).

Come again?

Could you give me a rundown on what's wrong with these screenshots compared to a "native" GUI? Because frankly I don't see the slightest difference.

> it doesn't have a native look-and-feel on any platform, and it lacks integration with the OS.
Could SWT change - partially - your mind about Java GUI? It's as native as it can get. It powers apps like Eclipse.

http://www.eclipse.org/swt/

Eclipse's C++ plugin (CDT) has actually fixed the parsing issue your mentioning as of version 4, which is about beta quality right now (final release June 22). I ran across the same thing and gave up on version 3, when I realized it would take 2 hours to index our product source code. I haven't benchmarked the latest version, but I understand it has been completely redone. In addition they've done a lot of usability tests and gotten rid of a lot of the complicated project set up. I tried out a simple hello world and got a working, debuggable, program in under 15 seconds. I'm hoping to see if it may be a viable alternative to Visual Studio here at work, simply because of its extensibility. In case you are interested in getting the download, go to http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/ and check it out.

Emacs vs. vi?? They both suck!!

I've been doing java development for almost ten years now, so I may be a little biased, but it's not all that difficult to get started doing server and client side java.

You need 3 things: an app server, a JVM, and a good IDE.

Using all free(mostly speech,some beer) stuff here's an example:

Download and install the latest JDK. I recommend SE 1.6(no EE, or netbeans)
Download and unzip/untar the latest eclipse with webtools bundle.
Download and unzip/untar the latest tomcat

Now fire up the eclipse executable, go to the workbench and create a new project of type "dynamic web project". It'll ask you to select which app server, and you can point to tomcat from there.
Now you've got a dev enviroment for java, jsp, webservices, etc with all the goodies like debugging and code assist.

To deploy just right-click the project and export as a war file that you can place into another app server.

The interesting thing is that IBM managed to make Lotus Notes portable by leveraging the open source Eclipse RCP platform. So, technically, Lotus Notes built on top of an open source core. However, IBM wrote and open sourced the vast majority of what is in Eclipse and is by far the largest contributor to that open source project -- thus making the circle of irony complete.

Flex Builder, the main development environment for the Flex SDK we're talking about here, is built on Eclipse. Not a timeline in sight. I highly recommend checking it out.

I totally agree... because it's sooooo easy to secure a complex operating system. Come on, ANY moderate to complex piece of software is going to have at least one bug in it which can be used to exploit the system. The reason why Windows appears so much more insecure than Linux is because you have a lot more people looking for and trying to exploit those bugs. If you want a more secure OS, get a smaller OS (Less things to go wrong and therefore capable of being exploited) or get an OS that less people use (so there's no motivation to find the bugs to be exploited). If everybody stopped using Windows tomorrow, some other OS (OS X, Linux, etc.) would step in to fill the gap and then it would start having the same security issues that face Windows now. What I'd like to see is for something like http://www.eclipse.org/ to be able to run natively on hardware without the OS layer. Then we could have a micro-kernel that could then load which ever packages were needed for the task at hand. There would still be bugs but less of them would be targeted at the 'OS' and more at a vulnerability at some package loaded to the OS.

IBM is a great hardware company. It has never been known for great software. Ask anybody who has had to use JCL. The inventors of IEFBR14 could never be known as a great software company.

I will admit that Eclipse is an excellent application but does anyone here remember Visual Age for Java? That app was seriously FUBAR and it would clobber ODBC on the machine when you uninstalled it which you invariably would since that is how bad Visual Age for Java was.

I'd like to know the story behind those two products. How could the same company produce two products with such disparate quality? Is the open source development model so superior that even a company like IBM can learn to make great software? Is it possible for a mega corp, like IBM, to be able to turn itself around and learn from its failures to start producing such great success? I haven't a clue.

Eclipse won. ATF

If you are a full-on Free Software advocate and only care about writing free/open source software, then I can see why KDE/Qt is usually the best choice. On the other hand, if you are interested in commercial development, like myself, you need to look at pricing as well. If you only want to develop for Windows, then the "SDK" is free and the "IDE" can range from free to a couple of grand with a premium MSDN subscription. But Qt itself costs around $1780 to $6600 on a per developer basis depending on console/GUI one/two/three platform development. If you work for a company with any clout, you can probably cut that cost in half for either platform.

Although I'm not doing anything now, the first thing I would use for a lean startup cross platform development is ACE with wxWidgets on Visual Studio Express or Eclipse with CDT.

It is just my opinion, but I think the pricing for Qt is too high. I wonder how big the Linux Desktop "pie" could grow if we could all settle on Qt if it fell under LGPL or BSD? Trolltech's smaller piece of a bigger pie, might still be bigger than the one they have now. Putting GPL/Free Software asisde for a second, from a commercial perspective, I don't want a "new Microsoft" on the Linux Desktop. Perhaps someone with some cash could revive the Harmony Toolkit...

I don't know about the Delphi PHP IDE in the article, but if you are looking for a new develpoment enviroment, I would strongly recomend trying eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/ with PHPeclipse http://www.phpeclipse.net/tiki-view_articles.php and XAMPP http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html. This compination is far more powerful than Dreamweaver, free (as in beer and speech), and has plugins available to support almost every every language I can think of. Which will help you in learning new languages with out having to learn a new IDE. Inaddition it can be made to run off a USB drive. Eclipse is java based so it is available for linux windows or osX.

The only advantage Dreamweaver may have is the WYSIWYG editor. There is an eclipse plugin for this (included in easy eclipse mentioned below) but I haven't used this much, since it's geneally faster and more reliable to edit the code to get the result I want. PHPeclipse includes an browser preview pane that, with the exception of directly editing the view in a WYSIWYG maner, is just as functional.

My two favorite features are the integration with XAMPP (an extrememly easy to setup and use local LAMP web server, which should work with Dreamweaver too) which allows for a Dreamweaver style design view for PHP code, and the Remote System Explorer (RSE) http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/tutorial/ plugin which allows you to connect and work on files on a remote webserver as if they were local, which is great for quick fixes and fixing typos.

To use eclipse, PHPeclipse, and XAMPP to create a portable development environment on a USB drive, check out http://www.plog4u.org/index.php/Using_PHPEclipse:I nstallation:XAMPP_Example_Installation for eclipse and PHP eclipse installation into XAMPP and this thread http://portableapps.com/node/929 to make it all portable. I would also recomend checking out http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/home/ for easy installation of eclipse with many of the most useful plugins preinstalled for you.

I don't know about the Delphi PHP IDE in the article, but if you are looking for a new develpoment enviroment, I would strongly recomend trying eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/ with PHPeclipse http://www.phpeclipse.net/tiki-view_articles.php and XAMPP http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html. This compination is far more powerful than Dreamweaver, free (as in beer and speech), and has plugins available to support almost every every language I can think of. Which will help you in learning new languages with out having to learn a new IDE. Inaddition it can be made to run off a USB drive. Eclipse is java based so it is available for linux windows or osX.

The only advantage Dreamweaver may have is the WYSIWYG editor. There is an eclipse plugin for this (included in easy eclipse mentioned below) but I haven't used this much, since it's geneally faster and more reliable to edit the code to get the result I want. PHPeclipse includes an browser preview pane that, with the exception of directly editing the view in a WYSIWYG maner, is just as functional.

My two favorite features are the integration with XAMPP (an extrememly easy to setup and use local LAMP web server, which should work with Dreamweaver too) which allows for a Dreamweaver style design view for PHP code, and the Remote System Explorer (RSE) http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/tutorial/ plugin which allows you to connect and work on files on a remote webserver as if they were local, which is great for quick fixes and fixing typos.

To use eclipse, PHPeclipse, and XAMPP to create a portable development environment on a USB drive, check out http://www.plog4u.org/index.php/Using_PHPEclipse:I nstallation:XAMPP_Example_Installation for eclipse and PHP eclipse installation into XAMPP and this thread http://portableapps.com/node/929 to make it all portable. I would also recomend checking out http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/home/ for easy installation of eclipse with many of the most useful plugins preinstalled for you.

Or (alternatively) using the official plug-in (which is supposedly better): http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/