Linux IDE For Web Developers?

bethorphil asks: "I'm a web developer at a company that concentrates on Coldfusion and Javascript for our applications. I've managed to subvert my workstation to the point where I'm using Linux 80% of the time, yet I'm still stuck with windows for certain aspects of development which are too time consuming without a nice IDE. I need FTP and RDS support integrated into the editor, and it would be nice if javascript debugging were available too. I haven't had much luck running ColdFusion Studio or Dreamweaver through WINE, and VMWare is too expensive. Several of my coworkers have expressed an interest in this too, so I'm pretty sure that a week after I find the right setup, the whole development team will blow away their windows partitions and join the rebel forces... :-) Does anyone have any suggestions?"

Comments

Re:yeah, just crack vmware

[tzanger]

Supports everything but DirectX from what I've heard.

You forgot a few things:

• NETWORKING
• Scrollwheel mouse
• Cut'n'paste between host and guest
• Win95/98 only (no NT)
• USB, DVD, PCMCIA (must be done through host)

Don't get me wrong, I use it every day as I believe it is faster than VMWare and I can customize my screen size (960x768 gives me my wharf on the right side). The networking hack is very poor and its biggest flaw, IMO. It would have been MUCH better just to emulate a network device and require a seperate IP for the guest like VMWare. I get no Network Neighbourhood, no ICMP and flaky TCP/UDP. DreamWeaver's FTP client crashes under Win4Lin.

Don't tell me to use Samba and mount under Linux. That's hokey as hell and doesn't solve some of my Windows Networking problems.

Win4Lin also uses the host filesystem (the windows filesystem is just a subdirectory). This is great and terrible at the same time.

Bluefish

[geirt]

I have been using bluefish for some time now, and I am very impressed. Although the authors says it is not finished yet, I have had no problems using it, it is very stable, and feature packed.

Cut n' paste from their web page:

FEATURES:

• A What You See Is What You Need interface
• Nice wizards for startup, tables, frames, and others
• Dialogs for all HTML 4 tags that have a lot of options
• HTML toolbar and tearable menu's
• Open any URL directly from the web, or using drag and drop, etc.
• Fully featured image insert dialog
• Thumbnail creation and automatically linking of the thumbnail with the original image
• A custom menu, specify your own tags or sets of code, and define your own dialogs
• Project management, link management, etc.
• Per project customized default dialog settings
• Reference for PHP3, PHP4, SSI and RXML (over 900 functions referenced)
• Preview options for dynamic HTML
• One of the most complete CSS dialogs
• Syntax highlighting with configurable regular expressions
• A nice configuration dialog, customizable shortcut keys
• A very powerful search and replace dialog, allowing regular expressions
• WML support (WAP enabled websites)
• Preview window (experimental)

Re:Bluefish

[geirt]

Oh, and I forgot: It is GPL :-)

komodo

[po_boy]

I didn't see anyone else mention it, so I will. komodo from active state is still really beta, but it may be heading in hte direction you want.

Personally, I believe emacs is still the best choice of an editor, IDE, and all the other stuff you need in this situation.

All your event are belong to us.

Quanta!

[phutureboy]

I've tried a number of web development environments for Linux, and have finally settled on Quanta for KDE.

v2.0 is supposed to have some IDE features, as opposed to v1.0 which is basically just an HTML editor very much like Cold Fusion Studio. Although v2.0 is in the release candidate stages, I haven't had had time to try it yet. I dunno if it will include any Javascript debugging features.

I doubt it can be made to work with RDS... but I have used it successfully in the past to work on Cold Fusion sites hosted on NT servers, by using the smbmount utility included with Samba to mount a share on the remote NT server.

I highly recommend that you check it out.

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Re:RDS

[giberti]

Forgot to mention this last night... RDS is also a HUGE security hole on ColdFusion based systems and Should not be used in a production evironment. For the happy hackers out there RDS runs over port 80, listening for a username and password to authenticate. the default username unless the site is using Advanced Security services is 'ra' (short for remote administrator). So then with a tool like dsniff, you can go and grab the password and be on your way. What you probably don't realize, is that once you have the password you have the equivalent to root on a win box (not sure about linux) all drive letters are available, and you can edit, delete, modify _any_ system file at will. Learned about this from the training people at FigLeaf in DC

RDS

[giberti]

Just so you know (as I'm sure you do) RDS is an prop. allaire format, try letting allaire know that you want their dev. tools on Linux, they made the leap and made CF4.5 available on linux, but no development IDE... Write a letter, perhaps Jeremy Allaire and the rest of the crew over there will stop playing with the Macromedia merger and work on creating some solid tools for the Linux WebDev crowd. I know I would apreciate it too.

StarOffice

[deth_007]

Oh my god! No one else has mentioned this? Staroffice comes with a complete web editor.. it's called, originally enough, StarOffice Web. All the nice fancy 'click-me' IDE stuff, no one wants to use emacs anymore, sorry.. That's what advancements in technology are for. :) (Ooo... going to be some burns on that one... I'm just kidding, guys). Anyways, check out StarOffice! It's free, it kicks ass, it runs on Linux just fine! Plus it's only 100megs and includes a write, calculator program, drawing program, presentation program, scheduler, mail, database... the list goes on. Anyways, I used to used frontpage, then dreamweaver.. now I use StarOffice. Another nice thing about SO Web is that ftp access is integrated.. just click on the FTP site on the left, and drag your local files up from a local explorer to the remote one. Click click click... (Author is in no way affiliated with Sun Microsystems(tm)).

one factor is code testing in a browser

[StandardDeviant]

Basically, NS 4.x is so different from the most commonly used web browser (IE of course) that testing the site with the browser you're clients will be using may well be what keeps you on win32. In addition to the obvious and extremely large differences in the DHTML arena, NS and particularly NS on linux just render shit differently. If your site designs are to a very tight tolerance in terms of appearance, this could become a huge pain in the ass.

Then again there is vmware to use IE. Or run it under wine. Or have the graphic designers/user interface designers stay on windows while the middle/back-end code monkeys move to linux.

--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org

EMACS is an IDE

[peccary]

That's what it what was written for, and it's pretty good.
- "one-button" compilation,without moving your hands off the keyboard
- integrated debugger (of your choice)
- integrated source-browser (for instance, the id-tools: mkid, gid, aid, lid, etc).
- integrated FTP (ange-ftp)
- integrated web-browsing
- fully extensible using a widely-known language
- integrated source-control (rcs,cvs,perforce,cml,whatever)

It may not be point-n-clickity, but you're a programmer for god's sake, not a luser. Bite the bullet, face the learning curve, you'll be a better geek for it.

Win4Lin

[lal]

I'm a web developer (php, perl, mysql) also, and I use a Linux box running a Windows emulator. I've used VMWare and Win4Lin as the emulator. Here's the breakdown:

Win4Lin Pluses: Cheaper and Faster than VMWare.
Win4Lin Minuses: Must patch the kernel (or install patched kernel from RPM)

VMWare Pluses: Can run OSes other than Win9X in VMWare Pro (e.g., Linux on Linux to test installations). No kernel change required.
VMWare Minuses: Slower than Win4Lin and more expensive.

I use Win4Lin now, mainly to check pages in IE. My IDE of choice is Emacs.