Irfan’s Corner on the Web On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology

Open Source World lacks Good Web Development IDEs

Linux is considered the de-facto server based operating system. A typical Linux distribution comes with everything any web developer could have asked for: php, apache, python, perl, ruby etc. However there is one thing that Linux sorely lacks: Web Development IDEs. Sure KDE comes with Quanta, and there is BlueFish, and there used to be Nvu. Each IDE has its own strengths, for example I love coding php in Quanta, BlueFish rocks at HTML authoring, however there is so much more to web development nowadays: XML, CSS3, JavaScript to name a few. And each IDE really sucks in handling these things. Today I was coding in Javascript and Quanta kept crashing!

To just give a flavor what the open source world is up against when it comes to web development IDEs. Just have a look at the latest enhancements to the already powerful Visual Studio (not a web development IDE par se, however VS always has supported web development due to ASP). Then of course, no comparison is complete without the mention of Adobe Dreamweaver, MS Expression Designer although seen as lame in the Windows world is light years ahead of any open source web development IDE unfortunately.

So what is a Linux web developer to do? Put up with crashing, feature deficient web development applications, or get the proprietary ones and run in them in through virtualization (this is the path I'm thinking of adapting)?