Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 2 years ago.
Improve this question
I am in the market for a new IDE but am confused about the overlap between some of Jetbrains' offerings. It looks like IntelliJ IDEA has plugins that allow you to do Node.js and php development.
Can IntelliJ IDEA do everything that WebStorm and PHPStorm do through plugins or do they have special features not available in IDEA? I am hoping to have a single polyglot IDE for all development.
All of the functionality of our lightweight IDEs can be found within IntelliJ IDEA (you need to install the corresponding plug-ins from the repository).
It includes support for all technologies developed for our more specific products such as Web/PhpStorm, RubyMine and PyCharm.
The specific feature missing from IntelliJ IDEA is simplified project creation ("Open Directory") used in lighter products as it is not applicable to the IDE that support such a wide range of languages and technologies. It also means that you can't create projects directly from the remote hosts in IDEA.
If you are missing any other feature that is available in lighter products, but is not available in IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, you are welcome to report it and we'll consider adding it.
While PHP, Python and Ruby IDEA plug-ins are built from the same source code as used in PhpStorm, PyCharm and RubyMine, product release cycles are not synchronized. It means that some features may be already available in the lighter products, but not available in IDEA plug-ins at certain periods, they are added with the plug-in and IDEA updates later.
But here's the rub, sometimes you can't or don't want to wait. For example I want to use the new support for RubyMotion which includes RubyMotion project structure support, setup of rake files, setup of configurations that are hooked to iOS Simulator etc.
RubyMine has all of these now, IDEA does not. So I would have to generate a RubyMotion project outside of IDEA, then setup an IDEA project and hook up to that source folder etc and God knows what else.
What JetBrains should do is have a licensing model that would allow me, with the purchase of IDEA to use any of other IDEs, as opposed to just relying on IDEAs plugins.
I would be willing to pay more for that i.e. say 50 bucks more for said flexibility.
The funny thing is, I was originally a RubyMine customer that upgraded to IDEA, because I did want that polyglot setup. Now I'm contemplating paying for the upgrade of RubyMine, just because I need to do RubyMotion now. Also there are other potential areas where this out of sync issue might bite me again . For example torque box workflow / deployment support.
JetBrains has good IDEs but I guess I'm a bit annoyed.
I regularly use IntelliJ, PHPStorm and WebStorm. Would love to only use IntelliJ. As pointed out by the vendor the "Open Directory" functionality not being in IntelliJ is painful.
Now for the rub part; I have tried using IntelliJ as my single IDE and have found performance to be terrible compared to the lighter weight versions. Intellisense is almost useless in IntelliJ compared to WebStorm.
IntelliJ IDEA vs WebStorm features
IntelliJ IDEA remains JetBrains' flagship product and IntelliJ IDEA provides full JavaScript support along with all other features of WebStorm via bundled or downloadable plugins. The only thing missing is the simplified project setup.
Taken from : https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/WI/WebStorm+FAQ#WebStormFAQ-IntelliJIDEAvsWebStormfeatures
Definitely a great question.
I've noted this also as a sub question of the choice for versions within IDEa
that this link may help to address...
http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/editions_comparison_matrix.html
it as well potentially possesses a ground work for looking at your other IDE choices and the options they provide.
I'm thinking WebStorm is best for JavaScript and Git repo management, meaning the HTML5 CSS Cordova kinds of stacks, which is really where (I believe along with others) the future lies and energies should be focused now... but ya it depends on your needs, etc.
Anyway this tells that story too...
http://www.jetbrains.com/products.html
As far as I see every time I make a change, for example the value of a configuration variable, I have to
Make a copy of the change in each project (webapp, Android, IPhone, etc.)
Build each project
Distribute each project (besides the webapp)
I have found PhoneGap build which seems to be a great solution for the mobile part. But it's still beta and it doesn't solve everything. I still have webapp's code, which is not exactly the same.
Do you know techniques, tools or tricks, which help to improve this process?
Thanks in advance.
We are currently developing a web/Android app using PhoneGap and Sencha Touch (iOS is coming soon). So far our approach is as follows:
We have one project per platform plus several additional toolkit projects.
One platform is "primary", web in our case. This is what developers mainly use to develop and test the app. We're using jsTestDriver for testing.
During the build, the app is packaged for web in the first step. We're producing several artifacts here (.war file, tests in a .jar file).
"Secondary" platform projects do not include the source code. It gets unpackaged and copied to the right places when projects are built. This also includes tests from the primary platform.
Platform projects contain some additional code - normally only testing code, app code itself is currently cross-platform (not sure if it will stay this way).
So we're doing it mainly through advanced build scripts. We're using Maven for web and Android. iOS is coming soon (into our work, I mean), so we'll be looking for some sensible build tool there too.
We're building our projects using Hudson continuous integration.
What I have to admit is that this whole environment (multi-project Maven builds, JSTD, multi-node Hudson) is a hell of a setup, took quite an effort to figure it out.
At our company we use Hudson for our CI, we use a lot of different languages and they all work well on linux.
We don't do this for our iOS projects. I know we can, using a mac with OSX and build projects using the terminal (command line). But can this be done using for instance Debian? Can one also run the unit tests xCode 4 creates?
The reason I am asking this is because I need to know that ordering a new mac mini (or any other mac) is necessary in order to comply with CI.
it sure can be done (i've tried it some time ago) - however, it is questionable whether is it worth the hassle. It is (was) far from straightforward process and from the business point of view the acquisition of a mac mini is way more feasible (i think). However, if you seek challenges you might give it a try, there is a project on google code called iphone-dev that should get you started.
At home, I use CTRL+SHIFT+B or F7 or whatever key sequence initiates the build for my build tool. At work, this doesn't quite cut it.
At my first job (an internship) we used a product called Visual Build, which I have come to like very much. It's the best build tool I've ever worked with. The down side here is that it's not free.
At my latest job, I came in knowing literally nothing about Ant. Now, unfortunately, I've become deeply involved in our build processes, and cannot extricate myself. It works, yes, but after coming from Visual build, it seems like it's fighting me every step of the way. Yes, it's free, but we're not trying to be a free-software-only development company or anything.
I've never looked in to make or any other build tools, so I don't really know what else is out there.
Has anybody ever seen or had experience with Visual Build? Mostly I'm fond of a few key things:
it has a GUI
it runs arbitrary VBScript without the need of a compiled class
you can step through the build process, or start from anywhere in the middle.
Are there any free build tools that have this? Is there any way to convince people that it's worth it to move on? It's 2008. We use IDEs to develop, why not (IBEs) to build?
Edit: I'm mostly looking for an answer to my last questions; Is there a solution with a built-in GUI that I can use for free?
Not very sophisticated, but we use a set of batch files. And that works great.
We use FinalBuilder - I think it's very similar to VisualBuild, though I've not used the latter.
It does run from the command line, and you can integrate it with CC.Net if you want.
For Java projects we use Teamcity, sort of cruise control like, but you can also do a remote run, i.e. you send your changes to the server, it builds and does unit tests, if everything works ok, THEN you checkin, very nice build tool and free for up to 20 build configurations.
For our Visual Studio 2005 projects including packaging the final exes and dlls with InstallShield and putting them up on a shared server we use Final Builder, it's not free, but it is very easy to use and get started with.
We also telnet out (from FinalBuilder) to a number of other platforms (Unix/Linux/OpenVMS) and start remote builds by running makefiles there.
We do not use continous build, but there is a FinalBuilder Server which handles that and comes free with the FinalBuilder Professional license.
We are very happy with FinalBuilder, it's quite easy to get up to speed with and powerful enough to solve most problems.
CMake. Generates build file for KDevelop, Eclipse, Makefiles and Visual Studio (and XCode), and it really works. You can easily extend it with macros, although the programming capabilities are rather limited. It's easy to learn, and porting an existing application from Visual Studio to it is pretty easy. However, you are limited to C++/C and IIRC Fortran code.
KDE is also using CMake now, so it seems to scale very well (i.e. generation time for the projects/dependency checking is not too bad).
I am not sure this is exactly what you are looking for, but I LOVE CruiseControl.NET. I have it build my projects using the MSBuild task. It doesn't have a GUI exactly, but there is a web interface to view the results of your builds and a System Tray resident program which will alert you of the build status.
UppercuT. It's free.
UppercuT uses NAnt to build and it is the insanely easy to use Build Framework.
Automated Builds as easy as (1) solution name, (2) source control path, (3) company name for most projects!!!
http://code.google.com/p/uppercut/
Some good explanations here: UppercuT
Going back to the keystrokes thing for a sec, I found Hoekey which the CTO loves. I don't use it myself, but as a way of assign keystrokes to things, it's pretty good.
I know nothing of Visual Build, but from your description it sounds like it is tied to Windows and doesn't run from the command line.
If you are building Java software (I assume you are since you are using Ant), it's preferable to have a cross-platform tool. If you can run the tool from the command-line, then it is scriptable which is extremely important for automation.
Ant is also extensible and a de facto standard. Many tools that you may use (Cobertura, TestNG, etc.) provide Ant tasks so that they can easily be intergrated with your build.
I use Ant for all Java projects. Some people prefer Maven, but I'm not one of them. Ant is far from perfect (the XML syntax is a bit clunky) but it is well documented, extremely stable and pretty straightforward.
If you use a standard tool, such as Ant or Maven, you will be able to take advantage of any number of Continuous Integration products. I doubt you will find many that work with Visual Build.
Most IDEs support Ant, so they give you a GUI of sorts and your CI server will give you a web interface for doing builds.
NAnt (.NET port of Ant). Works great and is easily extensible.
For small projects I do use post-build scripts and with the support of 7z, Nsis and similar CLI tools it's doing the job perfectly for me.
TeamCity and CuriseControl works well for any projects,but here is why you would like to choose TeamCity:-
Ease of setup: During setup we found TeamCity easier to setup and use especially compared to CruiseControl. We did not need to edit XML files or massively configure individual build machines like CruiseControl.
Ease of extensibility:TeamCity stands out in its ease of extensibility too. If we find that builds are waiting in the queue too long, we can add more computers as agents. The only additional work on our end is registering the new computers with the TeamCity server and installing msbuild and subversion.
Interaction with Subversion: One can check how many and what changes were committed to subversion since the last build, who started a build etc.
I've grown very fond of scons for building C++ files. It's very straightforward and the build scripts are written in Python (which is much better than some hacked together DSL IMO).
Ant or Maven are great little build tools.
And if you want to automate the build process there are some great tools like TeamCity and Bamboo.
Personally I use Makefiles for pretty much everything because they are simple as hell. But in my work, I'm forced to use ant.
The main problem I have against ant is that XML makes it hard to read and understand, even with the correct indentation. On the other hand, the verbosity of XML can help when reading someone else's ant file, but still makes it a PITA when the file is more than a few tens of lines.
As for having a GUI to build... I've always felt that's a minus rather than a plus.
Maven is the best for me because it handles the project dependencies
Is there an IDE that I can load on a Blackberry, E71, or an iPhone?
Apple released iPhone SDK for XCode a while back, check out developer.apple.com and Nokia also release their own SDK check out forum.nokia.com
But for pure Java Midlet goodness, i would recommend Netbeans (netbeans.org) their netbeans mobile application editor is a gem, second to none.
To answer your question, i don't think any phone is powerful enough to compile and test the code on themselves, so no ...
Not that I know of, typically you'll develop apps on a desktop machine (PC/MAC whatever) and download/control the application on the phone. Also I don't think Java is available on a standard (non-cracked) iPhone.
There was a palm based C compiler. I had some trouble finding it though, but it's called OnBoard-C. It didn't exactly have an IDE, it compiled notes. Considering there's a lack of embedded compilers, I'd be surprised to find full embedded IDEs. Oh... I recall there being a Scheme or Lisp too.
This maybe premature but, congrats, you just found a market niche.