[FLOW3-general] (SURVEY) Development Environment Platform and more

[Manuel Strausz]

Am 28.05.2010 09:34, schrieb Thomas Fritz:
> Hi everybody!

Hey.

> This is a kind of survey. Why? First, i want to know some details how FLOW3
> / TYPO3 Phoenix Developers do their daily development work, because i have
> some ideas which i think could help us all but i first want to know if i am
> completly wrong. Second, i think others might get some tipps here in the
> future for their daily development work. And last but not least i also think
> that some plugin developers (e.g.: DEV3 or others) can get an idea of how
> developers want to work.
>
>
> 1) Which operating system do you use / prefer for your daily work (Apple /
> Windows / Linux)? 32 or 64bit?

Windows 7, 64bit. Not really a preference, just a choice and I'm not 
really used to anything with an Apple logo on it ;)

> 2) Which IDE / Editor do you use? Any plugins? Which version?

NuSphere phpEd Professional 5.9, unfortunately it doesn't really support 
plugins. Also costs a bit of money but it's not a bad investment IMHO.

> 3) Are you satisfied with your whole Development Environment (IDE / Editor /
> Server Platform / Developemt Environment / operating system / etc )? What
> features, etc. do you miss? What would make you and others even more
> productive?

Kind of satisfied. I have tried most php related IDEs over the years, 
and phpEd is the one I stuck with for 2 primary reasons:

1. Code completion that actually works with huge code repositories and 
lots of different libraries attached. It's also not slowing down like 
Eclipse does all the time.

2. Debugging which is fast enough (could be faster, of course, if you're 
used to visual studio kind of debugging with c++, but it's pretty good 
in php-terms) and can be triggered directly by visiting a page in 
Firefox or MSIE. I wish someone would make a debug toolbar plugin for 
Chrome, I know I could probably do it myself but I never seem to get 
around to it :)

Now here is what I'm missing:

- Class generation wizards, like Java has for Eclipse, or Visual Studio 
has for various languages. This includes generating method stubs when 
inheriting or implementing interfaces.

- Getter/Setter method generation wizard

- All kinds of other wizards. Most of my php related work seems to be on 
the repetitive side when you are creating a lot of classes, and I don't 
really like violating the DRY principle all the time. FLOW3 has the 
right idea with providing scaffolding on the command line, it would be 
awesome to have that kind of functionaly directly in your IDE.

Finally, as you can guess I'm not much into coding HTML/CSS or any 
design work, so I'm primarily looking for tools that make coding php 
easier. I tried NetBeans a few times and might take another look, it 
seems like a solid foundation and has a few nice features that other 
IDEs lack. Also seems like a better basis than Eclipse to develop 
plugins for.

> 4) What kind of Server Platform do you use for your daily development work
> (Xamp, self compiled set of software, dedicated server, etc)?

Apache on a dedicated server at our company. When I'm at home I usually 
sync the sources and work on my local machine with a binary apache 
installation.

> 5) Do you work with others on one project? How do you collaborate your work?
> Which VCS Software do you use? What do you miss?

Yes, I work together with our HTML/CSS guru who is mostly responsible 
for making the templates look pretty, but he also does a bit of php 
coding. We communicate over skype when we work remotely, and sync our 
work using Git. I recently set up a 4 stage branching process:

1. "master" (default git branch) for the main development branch, can be 
unstable but should mostly work

2. "testing" for experimental development work which might mess up the 
HTML output for a while, and things related specifically to testing purposes

3. "gold" for tested, major milestone releases

4. "live" for the source as-is on the production server, the code there 
can always be transferred 1:1 to a production server. after adjusting a 
project to run on a production server, all those changes should be 
integrated into the live branch.

We used to work with SVN but a few years back we switched to git to get 
rid of the "central repository" philosophy. We actually do have a bare 
repository which acts as a "central", but any working directory can act 
as an repository as well, which helps if you are on the road and need to 
sync back-and-forth between your laptops (and you don't have any internet).

> 6) Do you use any Virtualization solution for development? If not, which
> would you prefer (Virtualbox / VMWare)?

Nope, not me. Can't really say much about it since I haven't tried it, I 
guess I would stick to VMWare if I had to do some MSIE testing.

> 7) Which environment (Windows / Linux / Apple) for development and/or
> production of your WebApplications and which version / distribution (XP /
> Win7 / Ubuntu 10.04 / Gentoo / etc) do you prefer?
>

I like to work on Ubuntu for server stuff, and generally have a pretty 
firm grip on anything unix-like. But for desktop work I always seem to 
retreat to Windows, which is lame, but it's just what I'm used to in 
that regard. At least it works OK as of Windows 7, can't complain.

>
> Thank you very much for your time.
>
>
> Kind regards
>
> Thomas Fritz

Thank you for a very intersting survey, loved reading about the 
preferences of other devs out there. Maybe something productive can be 
spun off this :)

regards,
Manuel