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What do you consider the most rapid RAD environment for a working prototype? Not for debate.
language
platform
IDE
DB
(personal note)
Thank you.
P.S.1 I was pretty happy with PERL for back-end prototyping... I get stuck when dealing with the UI... it doesn't seem to come as easy...
It's all pretty subjective I guess, but as you asked 'what do you consider', so...
Delphi 7 onwards (technically object pascal or Delphi language, I guess)
Windows 2003/XP
version 7 is the classic, newer ones don't seem as easy to prototype stuff in (to me)
SQL Express
in comparison I've used VB6, MS VC++ (from a long time ago), FoxPro/Windows and Visual FoxPro, and a very small smattering of VS2005 (C#). For me, Delphi is the all-round king every time. :-)
For prototypes on Windows, Visual Basic is hard to beat. If you need to suppoort another platform (or multiple platforms), then Tcl/Tk is fairly productive, as well.
I've always considered Perl to be my prototyping language of choice, for a few reasons:
CPAN - There's a module for just about anything.
It's easy to create hacks to mimic, fake or do something quick and dirty.
It works everywhere.
I think "most rapid" is heavily subjective. A developer with many years in VB will likely be fastest at prototyping in VB. A Java developer in Java. Ruby in Ruby. The "most rapid", then, is going to be heavily skewed by the assets (code libraries, developer experience and tools) you already have in house.
What you define as a "prototype" also heavily affects things. Is a set of pseudo-working screen shots mocked up in Flash to have some clickability for navigation enough? What is the required feature set and what is the target audience for the prototype?
As you can see "best" is going to vary pretty widely. It's probably close to certain that the language will be high-level and the IDE tools are going to have nice UI designers (assuming the prototype has a UI). If you have a lot of DB work, then database wizards that do the SQL grunt work for you will save time and generate reasonable, if not optimized, objects. The platform would likely be whatever platform the prototype should be for - after all prototyping a Windows app under Linux or a Symbian app under Palm OS probably won't give you too much benefit.
VFP is great for prototyping. I've seen posts (sorry, don't have links) from Microsoft teams where they say WPF allows fast prototyping for them.
Enthought Python Distribution. You create the model of your problem in python and then you say "create a UI for that" in one line of code. If you don't like some parts of the UI, you override the defaults for those parts (and nothing else).
Doesn't get faster than that if you're doing a Desktop app.
The resulting prototype will work on Windows, Linux and Mac.
If you're looking for a web RAD, I suggest to give Grails or TurboGears a try. TurboGears is easier to use, Grails gives you access to the vast space of Java web frameworks (hard to beat).
I'd say Python with wxPython
I find that prototyping using the Netbeans GUI builder gives me a great start. I'm a Java programmer mostly though.
Try out Axure RP Pro.
We did give it a try and found that it to be really very good. It generates the whole prototype in HTML with a few JavaScripts so it becomes easy to distribute prototypes.
Do check it out.
Handcraft
When you prototype any GUI interactively in the browser, you can go from as low or high fidelity as you want. Handcraft is focused exactly on prototyping, so it does a whole lot less than IDE's intentionally.
For working prototype:
non-gui: python
gui: ruby on rails
For mockups don't use IDE but some specialized mockup tool, read this here on SO: Whats the best way to create interactive application prototypes?
For hybrid approach (mockups then code): QT designer is the only viable option I found, due to it's specific architecture
There you go.
Related
I have a few questions that I hope clarity and facts can be fed all of us about this. First, the last release of ironpython had the feature of running on the mobile platform highlighting that on mono/android it runs best and not so much on the other platforms which are IOS and Windows phone. So does this mean one doesn't have to use the SL4A? Can i argue that monodroid hooks into the core of what android is capable of and so might give a more robust access/implementation/rendition of apps on android?
Next, I just want to be sure of this: As with python you can create full fledged desktop applications with ironpython right? Cos everywhere (almost) I see ironpython they refer to it as a scripting tool and how you can script aspects of excel etc which has prompted me ask such a question. some say that the speed of applications written using ironpython is not that great and I was arguing asking for why that opinion is held by those who were speaking and no one could say anything worthwhile.
Lastly, with the movement at novell and xamarin, I have not understood where mono stands in their release schemes. I have a mac and I installed a recent version of mono and when I typed ipy I saw something like mono 1.1.0 or something like that. Does anyone have a clue of what is going on with it.
I fell in love with python from learning ironpython and I think the ironpython concept is just sheer brilliance its a pity microsoft esteemed F# other it.
First off, for future reference, multiple questions should really be, well, multiple questions. :)
On IronPython for Android: it works slightly better than on other platforms (where it doesn't work at all right now) but it's still very, very early code. There are some limitations with what you'll be able to do (mainly, you cannot inherit from Java classes from dynamic code). It's very experimental.
On desktop apps: You can absolutely write full apps in IronPython. There are some samples that show how it can be done. In particular, PyWpfSample and PyGtkSample. Startup times are not great, but the actual runtime should be just fine for most GUI apps.
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Is there anybody using Fortran on stackoverflow? What IDE do you use and which one do you think to be the best?
Seems lots of people surround me are quite inconvenient with Intel Visual Fortran. Because there is no support for intellisense, refactoring, etc.
What about these ones:
Photran - An Integrated Development Environment and Refactoring Tool for Fortran (this one is everything you need :D)
Oracle Solaris Studio Advanced C, C++ and Fortran development platform
Well, as others already mentioned you could use instead of an IDE a separate text editor. Several come to mind;
VIM (or one of the family) - great editing capabilities, very customizable. Unfortunatelly, it is still an editor
not an IDE. It can be customized in a variety of ways of course, but that gets boring after a while. Also, it's syntax highlighting capabilities are somewhat wrongly made. Also has some problems/confusions with free/fixed format and f77/f90/f95 ...
Emacs - pretty much same advantages/shortcomings as the above.
SlickEdit - has very nice fortran support; unfortunatelly, modifying it is a little annoying and the support forums are not much help.
In general, editors like the above mentioned can be used, but in that case it is best to choose one from the start and stick to it; modifying your work habits as you go; since customizing everything can be time consuming to suit your needs.
Most editors have problems with fortran's syntax, since they're used to C's (where everything that "opens" has a "close").
As far as IDE's goes, your options are not that great:
Silverfrost's compiler used to come with it's own IDE (Plato, if I do remember correctly; it's been a while) - don't know what happened to it, and whether it still is "alive"
Absoft has one of it's own as well (never used it so ...)
There was a specialized fortran editor I once encountered; ya...something; unfortunatelly I cannot remember it's name; maybe someone else will know
One of the best options (which I used to use myself, so I may be biased) is Visual Studio + Resharper, which will add a few editing features to VS's editor. Most of them can also be accomplished with macros.
This post could use some editing but it is written in a hurry, so ...
Geany is nice too. I use it for my small projects in Fortran. Works pretty good too.
http://www.geany.org/
I've never used it, but according to the documentation, the NetBeans C/C++ plugin also adds support for Fortran. I use NetBeans as my IDE for everything except .NET development and love it. If Fortran support is half as good as support for C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, and PHP, then it is worth looking at.
Many Fortran developers use text editors plus some build automation tool like CMake or SCons. Partially because of lack of well-featured IDE.
However there are some projects. I've tried Photran, Fortran IDE for Eclipse. It has limited support for autocomplete and refactoring.
Also take a look at Code::Blocks IDE for Fortran. I do not like Code::Blocks...
We use an in-house extension to visual studio to get code completion for our fortran code and to assist us with debugging. But even so there is a lot of room for improvement. Our main issues are:
instability of visual studio. An error in the debugged program can crash VS.
sometimes VS shows corrupted stacktraces (while WinDBG shows it correctly).
debugger wont show values of variables of type CHARACTER(LEN=:), ALLOCATABLE
Edit and Continue not supported
We used Sun workshop and it was very good, but there is no windows version.
jedit has a nice fortran mode and you can define keybindings for the compiler and debugger.
for small to medium sized projects it is quite nice. it also has svn and multiple files search. also very nice is hypersearch where you get a list of you matches and you can go to the position with a single click. another goodie is a plugin for gdb and for ctags. you can very easily script all functions using jython. it feels a little bit like a modern version of emacs that uses python instead of lisp. check out the plugin manager. it lets you download all the plugins from the server and installs them for you (like in eclipse).
http://www.jedit.org
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I am just starting at a job in which I will be using a lot of ColdFusion. What is the best IDE/Editor to use?
I'd like to provide my personal reasoning behind why you might choose any of these editors (at least the ones I'm familiar with). Just saying "use this, use that" is not at all helpful. To large degree, the question is wrong. There's rarely a "best IDE" for a language; rather, there are multiple environments, each suiting particular needs. Here goes:
1) Dreamweaver
Why you would use it: its history as a designer tool makes it much easier for "non-coder" types to start cranking out websites. If you're a solo developer building a lot of "Tom's Corner Store" type of sites, even if they require some CF Coding (mailing list, subscribers, current specials, light content management, etc), its design tools, "template" features, and ease-of-deployment (ftp) make it an attractive choice. It has good-enough code coloring and code completion for the built-in CF tags and functions. It can interrogate user-defined functions in the same page. It has excellent CSS support. You can find a wealth of extensions, too. It's pretty stable and, in my experience, hasn't been very "crashy". It will do a fair amount of code generation for you as well (whether that code is "good" is debatable). All in all Dreamweaver is incredible software for web site designers.
Why you wouldn't use it: It is not free, and it is certainly not a "coder's editor". While it provides for extensions, they're typically interface-focused (javascript validation, etc), unlike say Eclipse plugins, which can run the gamut. For large projects, it simply does not have the code navigation features that many coders come to expect. It's web-focused. So if you're a polyglot, or even just like to dabble in compiled languages (java, etc), then you'll need to keep another editor on hand for those tasks.... you won't be able to do it all in one place. ColdFusion unit testing support is nonexistent in Dreamweaver. There is no step debugging for ColdFusion.
2) CFEclipse plugged into Eclipse.
Why you'd use it: CFEclipse is going on 6 years old now and has matured significantly. It's been quite stable for the last few years and most crashiness has been due to Eclipse itself and not CFEclipse (which was not true in the early days). Recently CFEclipse has seen an infusion of fresh blood and features are being added to make coding in it even more productive. It contains a wealth of keyboard shortcuts, many of the toolbar features people love from ColdFusion Studio days, and Eclipse's in-built code navigation features (namely, Ctrl-Shift-R for finding files quickly).
It has content assist for native CF Tags and functions, and some support for in-page variables, though that's never worked all that well. It does not support in-page functions, nor does it provide native true component insight (i.e. insight into components that you write and use in other code). It will support component insight to some extent with Dictionaries, but even then, it requires a lot of work on the part of the dictionary creator. Most people find dictionaries too much work to maintain, in my experience.
The lastest version of CFEclipse contains the best CFML formatting you'll find.
For me, "method explorer" and "Snip Tree View" -- particularly keyboard shortcuts for inserting snippets -- have been big productivity boosters.
If you work with ColdSpring, ModelGlue, Mach-II, ColdBox, and other frameworks with xml configuration files, CFEclipse's Framework Explorer is brilliant.
Because it's a plugin to Eclipse, you can do everything else you'd want to do in Eclipse. You wanna code java? You can. You want webservice support? you got that. You want to do step debugging, you can do so with the free Adobe-provided extensions for Eclipse.
The large plugin ecosystem is one of the most attractive features of Eclipse, and you shouldn't discount this when deciding on an editor. For example, I would not want to work without Mylyn, which integrates with issue tracking and in my experience has transformed the way I work, much for the better.
Eclipse's version control system support is excellent as well. Subversion is well supported; there's a VSS plugin; and recently a git plugin (if not two) has been accepted into the Eclipse foundation so we'll see native git support very soon (you can get it now with a plugin).
Eclipse's ANT support is excellent.
You can easily plug the MXUnit Eclipse plugin into Eclipse for unit testing your CFML (full disclosure: I contribute to MXUnit).
Finally, I have full confidence that the folks working on CFEclipse -- Denny, Mark, Jim, Peter, et al. -- will continue to work toward keeping CFEclipse as the best open source CFML IDE available. These are some of the brightest minds in the ColdFusion community and are passionate about their mission. If you choose to use CFEclipse, you are not choosing to use an IDE that will be supplanted by ColdFusion Builder. This project is in good hands.
Why you wouldn't use it: it's a code IDE, not a design tool like Dreamweaver. It's not perfect... code assist can be too aggressive in its suggestions. Eclipse itself, especially when you pile it up with all kinds of plugins, can get unstable on lesser machines. Finally, people who don't like the "Project" view of the world often have complaints about it because they're used to working directly with the file system view of the world. Its deployment support is nowhere near as simple as Dreamweaver, though you can find plugins that get close.
3) ColdFusion Builder
Why you'd use it: all of what I said previously about Eclipse itself applies to CFBuilder when used as a plugin to Eclipse. I cannot speak to the Standalone version because as of this writing, it still doesn't support plugins very well. This will most surely be fixed by the time it is released, but I don't want to speculate on what the Standalone may or may not do.
One of CFBuilder's big draws is "Extensions". These are a way to plug in CFML code into your editor. It's hard to describe, so I'd suggest googling for "ColdFusion Builder Extensions", and you'll most likely be amazed. Adobe's Terry Ryan has created "Apptacular" for scaffolding applications from a database, and Brian Rinaldi has a series of posts on building CFBuilder extensions. These are huge and will prove themselves to be a developer's best friend after CFBuilder is released.
CFBuilder's deployment support is, in my opinion, on par with if not superior to Dreamweaver's.
CFBuilder does not require an additional plugin to do step debugging. Just hit the debug button and off you go.
CFBuilder contains true component insight, meaning that it can introspect components you write and provide ctrl-space content assist. It can be wonky, however, and does require some configuration. But please remember that as of now, CFBuilder is still in beta. My best guess is that it'll be at least a few versions until all the kinks are worked out of this feature. Still, it's a big productivity and learning booster to get content assist on your own components.
CFBuilder provides a "Servers" view for stopping/starting your CF Server. It's built on Aptana and so contains the Aptana "tail log" view, which is great for watching log files. Just like CFEclipse, it has a Snip Tree View.
The CFBuilder "vision" is led by Adobe's Adam Lehman. He's passionate about CF and is a force of nature. I have great hopes for CFBuilder because of Adam's leadership.
Why you wouldn't use it:
For one, it won't be free. Noone outside Adobe knows yet how much it will cost, however. "Extensions" and the deployment features alone may be worth the price. Time will tell.
Because it's an Adobe product, I think it's reasonable to assume that releases will come as frequently as most Adobe products, which means... not very often. While CFEclipse deploys rather frequently lately -- and makes available a "nightly" site for the brave -- CFBuilder will most likely not do such daring-do. CFEclipse can afford to make potentially unstable builds available to the public, while it is perhaps not in Adobe's best interests to do so with CFBuilder.
Finally, it's still in Beta and might not be released for some time. If you get it now and start using it, remember that. In my experience, debugging is wonky, content assist sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, and a lot of people have experience crashiness. It's free beta software... you're getting what you pay for. But know that the more you work with this beta release, and particularly if you provide feedback via the public bug database, the better off all of us will be if it provides a best of breed editor for CFML.
Personally:
At home, when I do "designer" work, I use Dreamweaver when I feel that its Templates will help me build a site as quickly as possible. For existing side projects which require maintenance coding and easy deployments, I use ColdFusion builder.
At work, where I do almost no design work, CFEclipse has been my IDE since 2006. I've begun using ColdFusion builder a lot, though currently I split my time between CFBuilder and CFEclipse. One reason is that as of this writing, CFEclipse is more stable (i.e. it doesn't crash and I don't lose work). I fully expect stability problems to be mitigated by the time CFBuilder costs money.
Both CFBuilder and CFEclipse have public bug databases. CFEclipse has a well-attended public mailing list, and if you have questions, you'll get answers quickly. I cannot yet speak to the speed with which CFBuilder questions are answered.
Finally, for "coders", it's my experience that once you invest the time in learning the tools and shortcuts, Eclipse provides superior productivity compared with designer tools like Dreamweaver. For cranking out a designed site, a designer tool like Dreamweaver confers significant advantages.
The answer to the best ColdFusion IDE isn't an answer, but a question: "What are you trying to do with ColdFusion?" The answer to that question will lead you to an IDE that suits your needs for a particular project. Different circumstances or projects may lead you to a different tool which better suits your needs.
Notepad++ with CF syntax highlighting.
For free: Eclipse with CFEclipes plugin
For cost: If you're a developer, use Coldfusion Builder, if you're a front end designer Dreamweaver edits Coldfusion pretty well. I use it quite often.
I have heavily used Dreamweaver, CFeclipse with eclipse and now Coldfusion Builder. What I found is this:
1) Dreamweaver is only good for the few times you have to do some wysiwyg wizardry. The newer versions do have SVN integration so you might be able to get away with using it. I did use it for a few years on windows.
2) CFEclipse + Eclipse - Generally the standard of what' sbeen used for a while. Runs well, once you add in the Adobe dictionary files and subclipse, you have a good environment
3) Coldfusion Builder - This is Adobe's version of CFeclipse. It's still pretty new and getting to later beta. I switched to it about 6 months ago and haven't looked back. It's got a lot of wizards, including the ability to write your own plugins in CFML that will run right inside CFbuilder. It's free right now on beta but will likely be pretty cheap like the first flex builder that came out.
My Choice: Coldfusion Builder. It doesn't mean the others aren't capable, but you'll spend the least amoutn of time getting setup and maintaining your plugins, etc.
Since I had paid for and used Dreamweaver for a lot of years (Eclipse was generally sluggish sometimes on PCs' a while back until the excess of ram + cpu today), spending to have an adobe maintained copy of eclipse is okay with me. The wizards available in CFbuilder, especially for flex are excellent.
Hope that helps, good luck and share what you ended up picking and why!
For anyone who might stumble here from Google, you should also take a look at Sublime Text coupled with the ColdFusion package.
If you are familiar with Eclipse I would recommend Eclipse with coldfusion plugin.
http://www.cfeclipse.org/
Some use Eclipse, some use ColdFusion Builder, some use emacs or TextMate or vim. I use vim.
It doesn't take much time to try out an IDE or editor. Give them all a shot and stick with the one you like most.
The best IDE is ColdFusion Builder. It allows RDS, In Line Debugging, Extensions (written in ColdFusion!), Code Generation, Refactoring, supports JavaScript, CSS and HTML and so much more. It is currently in beta and should be released in production sometime this year.
CFEclipse is a great IDE for CFML and is the right choice if you are writing CFML for the open source engines. It is free and like most open-source free products it can do almost anything Builder can do if you invest the time to install the additional plugins (like Aptana) and tweak your setup just right.
I use both. At work, we use Builder. At home, I use CFEclipse.
Welcome to the CFML community!
Notepad++. Light and easy to use.
I'll vote for jEdit. While it doesn't offer great ColdFusion support beyond syntax highlighting, and therefore probably isn't great for learning ColdFusion, its flexibility in working with other languages (which seems to happen fairly often while working on the web), powerful macros, plug-in support, proper text wrapping, and loads of other features, make it the editor to which I always end up returning after trying out the "next best thing".
CFEclipse appears to be the most popular. Adobe has a beta of ColdFusion Builder (also based on Eclipse) but when I tried it a few months ago it was still buggy.
Personally I use TextMate (OS X) a pretty bare bones text editor.
I have used textpad, for 6 years, still a solid app, provides syntax coloring/highlighting, regular expressions support. Can easily search inside any file, through tons of folders/subfolders.
Just a fast loading, easy to use, tool.
Also has macros, and macro programming...
http://www.texptad.com
I'd like to throw E TextEditor for the Windows users in here as well. Its similar to sublime but it does have its advantages. E is more or less Textmate for windows and will allow you to run the cftextmate bundles. In addition to being lightweight and extremely fast you get the huge Textmate community developing bundles, color schemes, and other community driven content.
Some of the highlights of E is that it will allow you to open a directory and treat it directory as a project. Hitting Shift-Ctrl T will allow you to browse all the files in your project in a flattened hierarchy which allows you to find files extremely fast.
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The last cross platform desktop development I did was Java/Swing. What about flex?
Don't do it. If you need to go cross-platform, write the main guts of your application in a business logic layer that doesn't depend on any GUI framework and then use the native platform API to finish each app.
Your users will thank you.
I'd choose an open alternative and I'd try to avoid vendor lock-in.
As Richard said, "if you've mastered Java/Swing why not use it again?"
I've used RealBasic from RealSoftware for a few things just to play with it. It can get expensive if you need the pro version. It will allow you to build a stand alone binary for Linux, MacOS X, or Windows. I'm more of a server side guy but it was pretty straight forward to create the few tools I wanted to try making with it.
Qt
I'm a big fan of wxWidgets. My only experience with it is with C++.
A combination of Python, wxPython, py2exe and py2app is what I typically fall back on. I've recently had a run with AIR, and it isn't that bad.. so Flex might work for you.
Flex/AIR is a platform with a lot of potential.
It's also a lot prettier than anything Java or .NET.
I personally use Tcl/Tk because it is remarkably powerful and because deployment is a non-issue (with starkits and starpacks you can wrap all program resources -- images, sounds, dll/.so files, etc -- into a single executable file).
Tcl's not for everyone though -- some people find its simplicity a little hard to grok.
Ignore Flex it's not programming IMO. If you can code Java I'm pretty certain that FLex will be a disappointment. Flex has a place, I don't really consider it a proper programming environment.
If you've mastered Java/Swing why not use it again? I would.
.NET can be portable - but IME it's not quite as easy to move stuff about as it is with Java (although it is better than it used to be).
Also, does it have to be desktop - I would seriously consider (a properly architected) rowser based desktop application.
Eclipse RCP works. The result is decent on Windows and acceptable on Mac. It tends to be sluggish on Mac because of the high memory requirements though.
C# with Framework .Net can be good not only for Windows but for Linux with Mono.
Microsoft have a CLI that work on MAC OSX10.2.
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I know and have Xcode, but I was wondering if there were any other complete development environments that support Objective-C? I'm not looking for solutions with vim or emacs, nor editors like BBEdit that support syntax highlighting, but a full fledged IDE with:
code completion
compilation
debugging
refactoring
Extra points for being cross platform, supporting vi key bindings and supporting other languages.
Note:
I've updated and accepted my answer below as Jetbrains has released Early Access for AppCode, their new Objective-C IDE. Since this has been a fairly popular question, I thought it worthwhile to update the information.
I recently learned that Jetbrains the make of my favorite IDE (Idea) may support Objective-C (though it is unclear how much it will work for iPhone/iPad development). See the thread here for early discussion on this.
In the last year or two, they have started adding additional language support both in their flagship IDE as well as specialized IDEs (for Ruby, Python, PHP). I guess this is just another step in the process. I for one would love to have another option other than XCode and I couldn't think of one that I'd love more.
This is obviously vaporware at the moment, but I think it is something to keep an eye on.
This is now a real product, albeit still in Early Access. See here for a the blog on this new product, which will give you pointers to check out the EAP.
UPDATE: AppCode has now been released and offers a true alternative to using Xcode for Objective-C and iPhone/iPad/Mac development. It does still rely on Interface Builder for layout and wiring of GUI components and uses the iOS simulator, but all coding, including a slew of refactorings, smart templating and static analysis, is available through App Code.
Textmate is an editor like BBEdit but it has the ability to run commands such as compilation, debugging, refactoring (though it will do so via XCode). It also has code completion.
In addition, you can write your own commands for Textmate that you can then run.
I have been searching for something like this that does NOT run on mac for quite a few months now. Unfortunately I think that due to the relative obscurity of the Objective-C language that nobody has ever bothered producing such a full featured IDE for it. Until now, and we only have Xcode.
Using JBuilder I fell in love with the auto-completion and displaying the function 'hints' on the screen while I type. I am that sort of person who remembers the 'ideas' better than the actual syntax and really benefits from knowing right then and there that the code I typed was correct, not having to find out a minute later at compile time. And then to have to try and figure out if I just misspelled something, or if I truly made a conceptual error due to a misunderstanding of proper use of the language. Code completion and hints have always saved time on this for me.
I know some people may look down on this and say the feature is unnecessary if you know what you're doing, but I never claimed to be better than anyone else.
I may have to just give up and try and get OS X running on my PC. Which doesnt bother me in the least, just the rebooting to go back and forth to windows. I've tried to run it virtualized under VMWare but XCode kept crashing :( That reminds me I am going to google 'leopard vmware' and see if any progress has been made in that area.
Another problem in designing a full code-completion system with objective C is that the syntax is a little more forgiving, I dont know the exact technical term (strongly typed?) it is much harder to say exactly what sort of object belongs in a certain parameter and ANY object can be sent ANY message whether it implements that function or not. So you can spell a function name wrong, but it doesnt necessarily mean you made a syntax error... maybe you mean to call a function of that OTHER name and you just want nothing to be done if the function is not implemented by your object.
That's what I would really like to see for Objective-C, is an IDE that once it notices you are sending a message to an object, it displays a list of methods and function definitions that the object is known to accept, and walks you through filling in the parameters.
I think you would waste less time by sticking with Xcode rather than looking for another IDE if you want to develop for the Mac (or iPhone).
Apple made a lot of effort to kill any competitor in that area to make sure any developer wanting to develop for the Mac platform use Xcode and only Xcode.
It might not be the best IDE but it does work well and it is the IDE developers at Apple are using. Somehow it does its job. The frameworks and the documentation are very well integrated.
I use TextMate a lot and also SubEthaEdit but they are not full IDE as you’ve described above.
Best Regards.
Check out JetBrains' new IDE called "App Code". It's still in the Early Access Program, but even with the Early Access bugs it is hands-down better than xcode 4. I've been using it for commercial iPhone and iPad development.
http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/
I would like to second Troy's answer and note that JetBrains has AppCode in early access, so you can try it for free. It has the familiar UI of their other products, and yes, it supports vi! So far it has been very good. I have run into a few issues, and a few vi-isms that don't work quite right, but it is still better than suffering with Xcode. I do text editing with syntax completion in AppCode, but switch back to XCode to get into the GUI builder which is actually quite good in Xcode.
If you are an old vi-guy like myself, it is invaluable.
The short answer is: No. There are thousands of IDEs but Xcode is the only one which you seriously can name IDE. I suggest you have a look at the tries of GNUStep (in form of Projectcenter, Gorm) and then you can imagine the state of affairs.
I believe KDevelop is the only full IDE that supports Obj-C, but I'm not even sure how fully it supports it, having never used it myself. Worth a shot, maybe.
There are a few programmers text editors that support Objective-C, but I like Editra, mainly because I also write Python on Windows\Nix and it has great features. Editra runs well on all platforms and has a nice plug-in that supports Mercurial, GIT, and Subversion if you need them. Another nice thing, its written in Python. Editra Home
Found another, though it sounds less than ideal:
ActiveDeveloper - doesn't appear to have active support (last update was in 2006). Mac only.
KDevelop sounds like it only supports Objective-C syntax and only through its C support. I'm going to check it out anyway.
Textmate has a couple screencasts for Objective-C (here and here). It is Mac only, but otherwise looks pretty good. It is hard to tell from the screencast how strong the integrated support is as it seems to just have a lot of scripts to handle the code. Also, I can't tell if it does true code completion or just expansion for snippets.
So it doesn't look like there is anything out there that hits everything. I'll probably do most of my development on Mac, so I'm thinking I'll try out TextMate with XCode to see if it is any better than straight XCode. I'll take a quick look at KDevelop.
Thanks.