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Personal Webpage of David Duggins

Well, I was born on a normal day in July, 1981 and have been creating chaos ever since. Born in North Carolina, but raised in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, I have been messing around with computers nearly my entire life. I wrote my first program in assembly when I was 11. In my early teens I ran a BBS connected to Fidonet and started building a website for my band. In 1999 I was introduced to Linux, and it was love at first compile. I started my career in IT in the early 2000's doing IT for a Car Dealership in Charlotte NC. I wrote my first major web app in Cold Fusion (an ecom app) at that time. In 2006 I left Charlotte and moved down to Columbia where starting working as a developer, freelancer and consultant. Currently I am working as a freelance developer and DevOps consultant!!

Mac IDE For php Development

\n I’ve been trying out a lot of IDE’s lately. I’ve decided to post a run down of them and blog about my personal preferences. I’ve used the following IDE’s

*Netbeans *Eclipse *Coda *Dreamweaver *Aptana (Eclipse based) *Zend Studio 7 (Eclipse based)

For starters, I’ve used Netbeans for a very long time. I am very familiar with it’s features and know my way way around very well. It has very good support for php and the even has a great php community around it. I really enjoy they way Netbeans handles code completion and also it has a great snippet functionality built in. I particularly enjoy the ability to search entire projects for a string. It makes finding functions in unfamiliar frameworks a piece of cake.

Then there is Eclipse. I’m going to start with Eclipse and then fill in the other two Eclipse based ide’s afterwards. I find Eclipse to be slow. It is also a rather bulky interface. Maybe, you might say I’d like it better if I had used it before Netbeans….no…I actually used Eclipse long before I knew of Netbeans. It’s always been a bit clunky for me. All in all, it has allot of the same features of Netbeans, and for most people, I’m sure it really is just a matter of taste.

I used Aptana for a little bit on a project a while ago and it appears to be a fairly solid little ide. It comes pre-loaded with all the Eclipse plugins that you need to code web 2.0. It has loads of templates and javascript snippets to help you along. It just is still Eclipse.

I most recently decided to give Zend Studio 7 a run around the block. Once again, Zend builds on the Eclipse platform, but unlike Aptana, which has a fairly refreshed interface, Zend 7 is really just Eclipse with a few add-ons. It really didn’t seem that I would code better because I am using Zend Studio 7.

I gave a review on Dreamweaver not too long ago, so check it out for a overview of my thoughts on Dreamweaver.

Finally, we have Coda. I’ve been using Coda since I’ve first got the Mac. A friend turned me on to it, and I’ve been in love with it ever since. I bought it when it went on sale for $49, although it would have been worth it at the full $100. Coda is not a WYSIWIG editor like Dreamweaver, it is more of an advanced text editor. But it has some very nifty built in features that make it rock. It has a built in site manager that automagically uploads as I save to the configured server. I can use ftp and also ssh in with a shell interface. It has all the things that one needs, right there so handy to use.

How you design your web-sites is a very personal thing. I prefer to use Coda for most everything, and I use Netbeans whenever I need a more powerful ide experience.

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