My Development Environment
Monday, May 19, 2008
This article was originally on devblog.coobird.net.
My current development environment is on a laptop running Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition. The specifications are: AMD Mobile Sempron 2800+ (1.6 GHz) with 768 MB of RAM, a 40 GB hard drive (4200 rpm) on a 15″ LCD display. 32 MB of the system memory is assigned as the shared video memory for the on-board video adapter.
Most of the development is in Java, so I use Eclipse as the primary integrated development environment (IDE). Eclipse is a development platform which has an plug-in system which allows it to support multiple languages such as C/C++ and PHP. Many of the projects at coobird.net, such as Thumbnailatator and Dvaspi is developed in Eclipse. Eclipse is open-source software that can be downloaded for free from eclipse.org.
Along with Eclipse, I also have been tinkering with Netbeans IDE1 as well, which also supports multiple languages through its plug-in package system. Netbeans is also an open-source IDE which can be downloaded for free. One of the features that I like in particular in Netbeans is the Java Profiler, a way to check how much time is spent in a certain part of a program. This is useful in finding out which part of the code is taking a long time to execute, so it gives an idea of which parts of a program should be improved in order to achieve better performance.
When a text editor is needed, I use SciTE. It has features such as tabs, syntax highlighting and other user configurable features. It’s a light-weight, simple text editor with ability to compile and run programs from the editor itself with the console output being displayed as well. This editor was used to develop the early versions of Thumbnailator and Dvaspi before I started to use Eclipse.
Footnotes
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Links to the contemporary site as an Apache project. The Internet Archive has a copy of the page from 2008. ↩