Mar 11

Web browsers: The OS of the internet

I have recently started diving deeper into styling web pages for different web browsers and have found that it is not a walk in the park. Coming from a developers background I feel that you can almost compare the HTML and CSS standards adopted by various browsers to the foundations of programming for different programming languages and operating systems where the fundamental concepts are the same but other differences (such as lexical) can be a worlds apart.

This means that Web developers/designers Continue reading

Feb 28

A Developers friend: Eclipse IDE

Ive recently come to a realisation about what my most used programs are. Interestingly, I find that for doing any sort of programming, Eclipse is the best IDE out there. Similar products such as NetBeans are just horrible in comparison. Here are the programming languages you can do development for in Eclipse.

  • Java(deh)
    • Also Web development using JSP’s
  • C/C++
  • C# For windows application development and (kindof) linux/mac development.
  • Perl
  • Shell scripting
  • SQL
    • Including connection to databases.
  • HTML/CSS
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Flex
  • ColdFusion
  • Event B

I should clarify that by ‘do development’ for these languages, I mean proper IDE support such as syntax highlighting, code completion and debugger/compiler integration. You can see that the list covers a very broad spectrum of programming languages ranging from scripted languages to web development to even hard core programming languages. Interestingly the only well known language that isn’t very well supported(from what i can tell) is Objective-C. I sometimes think that Apple should just abandon X Code and join the eclipse movement… which wont happen any time soon! Also, I hear that there is upcoming support for Google golang. These languages are coupled with a similarly useful set of tools and features that put the icing on the cake! Here are some more extensions you can get which make eclipse so much more awesome:

  • Subversion(SVN) support.
  • Mercurial support.
  • CVS support.
  • Regular expression testers.
  • Task management with JIRA and TRAC integration.
  • Class diagram generation support.
  • Integration with Remote services such as Google App Engine.
  • Code formatter support(for Flex development).
  • Debugger integration.

This list is not even close to being complete or exhaustive. Theres a good chance that if you need a feature, a quick Google search will give you what you need. I would suggest that you spend a hour or so and see what it can do for you. Shout me a message in the comments or on twitter if you need any help.