Coding pure in Eclipse

I’ve used every version of Dreamweaver from 3.0 in 2000 to the current 9.0 (CS3) in 2007. It’s a tool I’ve mostly used because that’s what I was supplied with at various jobs. Even through that many versions, problems have persisted. I still find it quite easy to crash the program. Do something it doesn’t like, and it’ll freeze up or crash or whatever. I’ve always thought the integrated file explorer/FTP Client was always a nice feature, but Dreamweaver’s FTP client has always been one of the worst ones out there. It’s better now than it has been in the past, but I still find it just has tons of problems. It is far worse than any free-standing FTP client.

Oh, and Dreamweaver has the bloat. Big time. Most Adobe apps these days take forever to load, even on my brand-new work computer with a fast multi-core processor and gigs of RAM. But despite its flaws, I’ve still used Dreamweaver. It’s never been a favorite app of mine, which is a shame because I use it so much.

Lately though I’ve been doing more programming than I’ve done since college. It feels good to code again, but in this area Dreamweaver especially falters. People used to use HomeSite for Windows web programming. But that’s been long since discontinued, and Macromedia (now Adobe) has tried to make Dreamweaver a comparable coding tool.

But it’s simply not.

I was interested to hear recently of people using the open source Eclipse for web development. Normally one thinks of Eclipse in relation to Java development, since that is the community from which it springs. But Eclipse is an extensible framework capable of handling many different languages and environments. I took a look at Eclipse.org and downloaded the all-in-one version of Eclipse with PDT – PHP Development Tools – built-in.

It was very easy to get started using. I skipped the tutorials and dived in and created a project. I’ve been using it for a week, and it’s already made a significant difference. For one thing, I have easy access to the functions and classes of PHP 5 with references as to input parameters and return types. Also it does syntax checking automatically, so it’s very easy to track typos and such.

There’s a lot of depth in Eclipse, and I’m just learning the tool. But I am already impressed that it has made me more productive. Using an IDE for development just makes a lot more sense. It feels like a real coding tool, and it is.

So I’ve already said goodbye to Dreamweaver and shifted my development work into Eclipse. It’s open source so it’s free software. The Eclipse Foundation manages the community that develops it.

It’s worked well for me at work, but I’ve used it now at home to modernize Manufactured Environments’ templates into the new module structure available in Movable Type 4.0. Eclipse feels like a good match for the type of tasks I’m using it for – PHP development, XML and XSLT development, and general web work.