On the Linux platform we (web) developers have quite a lot of texteditors or IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to choose from.
What I miss are tools like Visual Studio and Dreamweaver. I know that we have MonoDevelop on the Linux (Windows and Mac)-side, but this is mostly a development environment for developing applications (and ASPX-websites). We also have Qt (which shall support PHP, but I haven’t checked it out – yet) and RealBasic.
I am glad that those development tools exists. Without them Linux-developers would still be working with one program that creates the GUI, and another (most likely VI(m)) where code development would happen. There are positive side effects from separating code and GUI like that, but at the same time it makes developing a tad bit harder. Coming from the Window-side (who hasn’t?) I have been used to GUI-design and code in the same program since Visual Basic 1.0 and Borland Delphi 1.0, and later Visual Studio.
To me using MonoDevelop is as natural as coding in those before mentioned programming tools.
On the web side (thinking PHP, Perl and probably also Ruby here) we are lagging behind Windows here. I know we have Kompozer (former NVU) on the Linux side, but this tool lacks a lot of the features that Dreamweaver has. Also: it is filled with bugs.
I really wish that ActiveState, Aptana and/or Eclipse would step up and start working on a “Studio”-like software where designers can design the website easily (and of course clean up the HTML afterwards) and the developers can create the code to make the website work as intended – in the same software. I really hope we get there one day.
One feature that I would very much like to see is that if a developer created a class for, let’s say HTML-form-elements, this class could be added to the toolbar and be used by designers later.
