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The Dreamweaver Umbilical Cord, cutting loose…

One of my biggest complaints of Dreamweaver was that it made me a lazy [in a bad way] programmer. Personally, I am always looking to make life easier. We’re programmers damn it, we are naturally lazy

I have learned a great deal about web development these past months and every day brings its new and fun challenges. Of course I get stuck from time to time, but I have a great team of programmers that are aiding my growth and development when needed. Yet my editor has remained stagnant simply because it did what I needed, a place to write code. Although Dreamweaver is a great editor in its own right, I am always trying to explore new and easy ways to increase my productivity as a programmer. In my opinion, the reason why people do not like try new things is because they DON’T like taking the time to learn something new. If something goes wrong and they don’t know how to fix it, they go back to something that does. I call this the Microsoft Windows effect. What I plan on doing is stop using Dreamweaver cold turkey for 3 months and then see if I can chose to go back. Like anything you have grown use to, you need time to detach completely for a few months to truly appreciate something new.

Learning your way around a new IDE can be time consuming, but I will share many common mistakes and pitfalls I have made through trying to use this IDE. Maybe you can share your experiences with me as well =)

Initial Setup –

1) EasyEclipse for LAMP – [http://www.easyeclipse.org ] The reason why I choose this flavor was because I plan on developing with many different development languages.

2) Aptana Plugin for Eclipse – [ http://www.aptana.com/ ] It was recommended to me and plan on using this to develop projects in PHP.

It’s great to try something new. I consider this my detachment from the Dreamweaver umbilical cord.

Initial Install and Problems.

Installing EasyEclipse LAMP - http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/distributions/lamp.html

Installing the EasyEclipse environment was a snap. This document is useful if you are installing it in another distribution.
http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/help/install-distribution.html

Installing plugins [IE Aptana] proved very difficult because of an error I could not get around.

Eclipse Tools (3.2.2) requires plug-in “org.eclipse.emf.codegen.ecore.ui”.

Installing these two packages should get rid of this error message.
http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/plugins/eclipse-modeling.html
http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/plugins/eclipse-tools.html

Here are few things I will start tinkering with.

AnyEdit Plugin - This plugin already comes packaged with EasyEclipse. This allows you to convert spaces<->tabs. I can see this having a great benefit with projects with multiple programmers working on the same code. This can make your code consistent.

Aptana Code Assist - A nice little app that provides you with a quick reference to code you can auto complete with.

Xampp - I use Xampp for windows to develop projects locally and having a nice little control center up front should be a nice thing. I’ll share my configuration with the latest version of Xampp [http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html] It doesn’t seem to work right off the box.

I will provide some tips and tricks, as I find them with this new editor. If you have any that you recommend, please provide them here so I can check them out as well. Even if its a new IDE editor.