November 2008 Archives

For the longest time, I have been in the quest for the perfect development environment, and I've had little luck until this past week.  Now do not get me wrong there are loads of great environments out there, and I have used most of them.  Back at Raytheon, I used Rational Rose, StP, Visual Basic and Symantec Visual Cafe for Java.  When I came to Penn State, I did a lot of Java, so I continued to use Symantec and its various follow-ons.  Then I branched out to other languages and platforms.  I'm not your average programmer who in a day just uses one language.  Monday for example, I was coding some "C", PL/SQL (Oracle), shell script and Java.  And all of it was done using "vi" on UNIX.  My desktop is a Mac, but I just never found something that worked for me.  I tried Eclipse and I really wasn't impressed.  So I almost came to the conclusion that I was just going to be stuck using "vi".  Now do not get me wrong, I am really good with "vi", and the other UNIX tools, but I was missing the features of an integrated environment.  Well folks, good news I found my environment and its NetBeans.  I am running version 6.5 on Mac and its great.  I ended up loading all of the plug-ins for the languages that I deal with.  And to make matters even better, Wednesday I found a PL/SQL plug-in.  Now I can develop stored procedures, compile and debug them from my desk.  Being the old programmer that I am, I have to admit that I did switch the editor to use "vi" bindings.  Some things are just hard to give up.