My Dev Environment - Anil

Since we are talking about our development, I think it is useful to see the tools we use.

Old and Busted…

When I started with the dev team the only laptop that I had was my Asus Eee PC 701 which was a pretty decent netbook to travel with but a bit lacking in terms of power and screen size for the development that I had to do. The dev team gave me a Dell Latitude D610 which was a pretty decent machine. It came preloaded with Windows XP and Windows Vista so I promptly installed Ubuntu 8.04 using Wubi which became my main OS environment.  It’s not that I hate Windows, but I find that I am more productive when I can focus on development rather than fixing my machine. Plus, it makes sense to develop in a Linux environment when the applications you are developing are deployed on a Linux powered server.

The development that I do is based around PHP/MySQL. I had aa installation of XAMPP for Linux which gave me an Installation of Apache, PHP and MySQL that I could easily duplicate across my Ubuntu Desktop at home and my netbooks.

For an IDE, I went with Gedit, which is a simple text editor for GNOME. While it may not be a full blown development IDE, it was simple and functional. I did try a copy of Zend Studio and I found it to be pretty good but I never got around to buying it after the trial ended so I went back to Gedit.

We use Subversion as our revision control system and I was happy to use the command line svn client although I am still searching for a graphical svn client comparable to Tortoise SVN for Windows.

Of Course, Firefox was the browser of choice when it came to testing my application, especially with the Firebug plugin. However, for testing purposes, I did find myself having to go back to Windows to make sure the application worked in Internet Explorer. Instead of switching between the Ubuntu and Windows installations on the laptop, I opted to install Windows XP in a virtual machine using Virtual Box.That way I could work with Windows without having to switch out of Ubuntu.

Although I used phpMyAdmin to administer the local database, I did find OpenOffice.org Database to be very useful, particularly it’s query builder which is very useful when trying to develop complex queries quickly.

Now, don’t let the “old and busted” title fool you. I was very happy with the dev environment I created. Ubuntu was extremely stable and I was comfortable with the tools that I used. I should note at this point that the rest of the dev team used Macbooks while I was the only developer using a Dell with Ubuntu. If anything, it did prove that a developer can successfully work on the same application with a totally different development environment.

However, I was looking to get a laptop of my own which brings us to..

…New Hotness!

Although I was happy with the dev laptop that was given to me, I was interested in getting a laptop of my own. Through a perfect storm of good reviews, peer pressure and tech lust, I bit the bullet and got my own Macbook. I must say though, the experience so far has been great. I love the interface and the Unix base means that I don’t have to stray very far from my Linux roots.

Recreating a similar dev environment was very easy. XAMPP was replaced my MAMP, while I use the Mac versions of Firefox, Subversion and OpenOffice.org. I still use Virtualbox to run a Windows XP virtual machine for testing. The transition took me no more than 2 hours to get my new dev environment just as functional as the old one. The only major difference is the IDE, where I decided to try out the Eclipse PHP Development Tools.

Moving on

Although I am enjoying my Macbook experience, I have not been totally engulfed by the Apple reality distortion field. I am still very much an Open Source and Linux enthusiast and I have managed to find a great deal of Open Source software for the Mac. I also the same Ubuntu dev environment that I had on the Dell installed on my desktop at home, not to mention my stable of Asus eeePCs. However, I can now say that I experienced all the major software worlds; Windows, Linux and Mac.

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