To IDE or Not

An IDE is an Intergrated Development Environement. Like most things in technology, it’s as easy to find someone who loves them as someone who hates them. The PHP programmers on my team consider IDE completely bloated evil, while the Windows C++ team swear by Windows IDE, Visual Studio. (The PHP team does do debugging and profiling with xdebug, so they are not complete heathens.) I’ve been in both camps, once developing all my ASP in Visual Studio, later PHP websites in Notepad. I’m always hesitant to take a dogmatic opinion on a technical battle, so I remain open to both.

I’ve been playing with Zend v. 6 and found this interesting comparison chart of some other web development IDE options by Davey Shafik.

The biggest problem I have with IDE and frameworks is not the overhead they call create. It’s how to get five different programmers to all buy into the same platform, with out beating them with a stick or owing them beers for the next dozen Fridays.