Development Software?

[littlened]

Not sure i've put this in the correct forum, but it's the only suitable match I could find.

 

I've been working with HTML/CSS for about 16 year, and PHP for around 10 year. During that time my main editor has always been Dreamweaver. I've never really used design view, I've just always liked it because of the FTP integration, being able to copy files within the application, and the ability to just drag and drop images into HTML/CSS documents and it auto formats the path to the image for you.

 

My version of Dreamweaver is getting out of date, so I've started looking at other software that I could use to perform my tasks.

 

The first I tried was Aptana Studio. I used it for a while and I found it was ok, the CSS auto-complete wasn't as good and it didn't have the ability to drag images into your code and it create the paths for them. On the PHP site it was great, it knew all my class names and made coding in PHP slightly easier. I could setup each project to auto-upload to FTP, which was good but not as simple to setup as Dreamweaver. SVN integration was good too, but again setup is a bit long winded. I eventually stopped using is when I got sick of it being slow.

 

I didn't both trying Zend Studio or Eclipse as I just assumed they'd be roughly the same.

 

I came across Coda, which being a Mac user I found it had a much more attractive interface, and setup of projects was very easy. I used it for a couple of month. The PHP side of things wasn't that great, nowhere near the standard of Dreamweaver or Aptana. It had the ability to simply drag an image into your code, which I always find handy. But again, at times I found it running slow, and the auto-complete in CSS wasn't as good as Dreamweaver. Coda also has this great feature where you can install an app on your iPad, and you can see the results of your HTML/CSS as you're working on it.

 

More recently I've looked at NetBeans, which again seems very capable when it comes to the coding site of things. But the HTML/CSS side doesn't seem that great. Again, you can't just drag images into your code.

 

A couple of days ago I downloaded a trial version of Dreamweaver CS6, and it seems to meet my needs perfectly. FTP integration, I can setup multiple FTP account for a project (development/production), copy and paste files within a project. The HTML/CSS coding aspect of it is by far the best of all the applications in my option, and the PHP side, although not fantastic is still very good. The new live view is handy too.

 

My concern is that because I've used Dreamweaver for so long I'm missing out on some of the great features of some of the other applications out there, just at the moment, having never really used or understood those features I've never missed them. There's also the stigma that seems to be attached to developers who use Dreamweaver.

 

I've considered using two applications, Dreamweaver for frontend stuff, and maybe Aptana (or similar) for the PHP side, but if I can I'd rather stick with one application (Dreamweaver isn't cheap), as setting up two projects in two applications along with the SVN and FTP details can be a little time consuming. Especially when many of my projects only last a week or so and few are very long term projects. There's also the fact that once a site it ready to go live, I have to go back through and change all the FTP details for the project.

 

To give you an idea, most of the stuff I do is creating HTML/CSS and integrating it into my own CMS. I can go through periods where I'm doing more HTML than PHP, but then other times I can be doing more PHP than HTML. So really I need an application that strikes a nice balance between the working with the two.

 

So, the point of my thread is, as a long term Dreamweaver user, what (if any) features am I missing out on? I know other IDE's have built in debugging etc, but I've never really been a fan of running projects locally on the machine, I prefer to have a web based development server which allows me to work on projects from both the office and home. When I do debugging on a project I generally just output variables on the screen, do any of the IDE's have the ability to show you the values of variables at certain points through the executing process?

 

Does anyone still use Dreamweaver these days, or is a more a frontend development tool?

Edited October 6, 2012 by littlened

[ignace]

Well I use PHPStorm for pretty much everything.

 

Ever since they introduced support for Jade, CoffeeScript, and LESS. My HTML, JS, and CSS days are over.

 

When you create a new project in PHPStorm it allows you to select a skeleton structure to start from. In my case that is the HTML5 responsive template found at initializr. They also support certain frameworks like Symfony 2 and Doctrine 2 and allow you to run commands like symfony init-project foo and the like.

 

In the background I have a script running (written for NodeJS) that checks wether any of those files changed and compiles them. PHPStorm detects these changes and automatically uploads them to my default server.

 

I have the same setup for my composer.json file (which runs composer.phar update).

 

They also support Live View for Chrome (and Firefox I think) which means I don't even have to hit F5 anymore, just ALT+TAB to my open browser which shows my latest changes/fuckups.

 

IMO your editor should support your workflow and allow you to smoothen it further.

 

PS: They also support viewing images in your editor, auto-complete paths inside href="", src="", url(), and require(), and dragging images/files to any of these.

 

PPS: They also support remote development, but keep a local copy to work on (auto-upload when the editor loses focus). Try the trial, and select New Project > FTP.

 

PPPS: I strongly recommend you check out Monolog and ChromePHP so that debug messages don't appear in your output but instead in your Web Inspector (F12 in Chrome) like a console.log() does. And your IDE should support stepping through code and creating breakpoints to inspect variable values. Also when you are doing OO development you should also consider PHPUnit or at the very least assert.

 

Does anyone still use Dreamweaver these days, or is a more a frontend development tool?

 

I don't think many developers consider it at all, probably having something to do with the stigma you talked about and possibly because of it's crappy workflow support. I may try out their Edge Code though.

Edited October 6, 2012 by ignace

[littlened]

Thanks, that was very informative.

 

I did try PHPStorm, but the thing that put me off was it didn't seem to pickup your class names from your stylesheets, which although isn't major, is a basic thing that I like.

 

One thing I noticed about Netbeans that I didn't mention before. You can't seem to create new folders within a PHP project? Or if you can it's not obvious how you do it.

Edited October 6, 2012 by littlened

[ignace]

but the thing that put me off was it didn't seem to pickup your class names from your stylesheets

 

Yes it does. But it needs to be able to recognize the path. When it can't it'll show up highlighted in yellow/orange. Then you either need to adjust the path add a / to the start or mark the stylesheet directory as a resource root.

 

I use it to autocomplete classes and id's and to view all applied styles to a particular element.

Edited October 6, 2012 by ignace

[littlened]

I had another ready of your original thread, and to be honest there isn't anything that PHPStorm provides that really jumps out and gives me a reason to use want to use it.

 

Most of my projects I create initially from an export of an SVN repository (my CMS). So having it create templates when I create a new project isn't a big one for me.

 

Dreamweaver can be set to auto-upload files to your FTP when you create then, and you can setup multiple servers per project/site (i.e. development, production).

 

Dreamweaver CS6 has a live view feature, and an element inspector.

 

I'll checkout chromePHP though, it looks useful.

[ignace]

In the end it's each to it's own on what editor you use. There is nothing you mentioned PHPStorm can't do, not even the live view or the element inspector except then that PHPStorm is smarter and through a plugin gives you the the live view instead of DW who makes sure you have ONE MORE browser you need to tweak your css to.

 

I believe an editor should support and allow you to improve your workflow and use new tools, like Jade, CoffeeScript, and LESS as they are made available and routine tasks like running tests, checking builds, track time on/close/resolve/create tasks/bugs, among others that a professional developer uses on a daily basis.

 

Why do you export from svn while you should actually create a new repo for your client and through an svn:external link to your cms repo.

 

It will also allow you to commit to a live branch of your client to release software instead of opening your ftp client and upping all files, so 1980's. I hope you use a specific .htaccess that redirects any visitors to a maintenance page so that they don't see a broken website while you do this, right?.

 

Because imagine something went wrong, it would leave the website broken until you fixed the problem, which can be as long as a few minutes till a few days. While with version control you can just revert your live branch to the earlier version and through a commit release it right away.

 

--

 

When you have multiple clients on one server you create a symlink to centralize all your cms files which saves space although this may no longer be a valid argument since HDD is so cheap although it may on SSD drives.

 

Don't use ChromePHP directly instead use it through Monolog, so that you can log to a file while not in dev-mode.

Edited October 7, 2012 by ignace

[littlened]

Thanks again for the reply.

 

I'd never heard of Jade, Coffee Script or LESS until you mentioned them in your original post, I'll have a read up on them.

 

I only use SVN for the main development version of my CMS, mainly because I simply perform an export of the CMS for each project and modify each one to suite the functionality requested by the client. I find having an SVN for all projects difficult to manage if I'm honest, and many of the websites we develop are for small businesses and not really business critical. Most of what we do is for marketing agencies who don't have the skill in-house, so if we had a repository for each website we created, we'd literally have hundred and hundreds, many of which we might never work on again.

 

It seems that when it comes to actual application development in PHP, there's a fair bit I don't seem to know, much of which seems overkill for the work we do at the minute. However, next year we'd like to target more application driven projects, so I'm certainly going to have to get a book specifically for development PHP applications rather than PHP websites.