Elysian Shadows

Hello, I'm looking for a web development IDE.

I've been using Dreamweaver for ages now and it's great and all, but I was wondering if there's something free that would do the job, as the only features I really use are the integrated FTP / site management and the nice syntax highlighting / code complete stuff, and I'm now on a slow PC.

So I was wondering, can you reccommend anything similar but more lightweight?

Cheers

Aptana Studio is pretty good. It's a re-written version of eclipse specifically for web development. It has all the features you mentioned.

Depending on your religious viewpoints, I'd take a look at either:

1) Flex Builder (AS + MXML)
or
2) Ajax (JS+XML)

Or maybe even
3) Silverlight/XAML
4) OpenLaszlo

edit: Woops. I don't think I'm understanding what kind of 'web development' you're doing. All of my recommendations are assuming you're geared more toward IRA development (assumption drawn by the fact that you're posting on a game development forum) so if I'm wrong, lo siento--disregard!

editedit: Haha, I'm an idiot, you're looking for IDE not SDK's. Disregard the whole post (Except for Flex builder?). ;p

I use Netbeans, but thats only PHP and HTML as far as Im aware of

RyanPridgeon wrote:Hello, I'm looking for a web development IDE.

Be more specific. What's site management (for us who don't know much about Dreamweaver)?

davidthefat wrote:I use Netbeans, but thats only PHP and HTML as far as Im aware of

I use it sometimes as a Java IDE(wich is what i think it was designed for???), so it should be possible to do some servlets and jsp stuff too

Having done alot of web-programming myself, I've come to understood that there's nothing better then no IDE, just a good old text-editor and a bunch of firefox addons. The reason is simple, really (my views, not always everyone else's).

Most of the IDE's for web development are sadly bloated and over-the-top (Dreamweaver and ever other IDE listed here minus the flash ones). While there are some which have supposedly decent features (PHP debugger comes to mind) and code complete. Which when it comes to PHP/JS development would be rubbish IMO due to the way the languages work. Say as part of ajax you send some new javascript inside a call, there's no way DW can account for that. Then you have some (such as netbeans) which doesn't provide almost any (any at all?) support for javascript.

Long story short - In my experience the IDE's give you so much that simply isn't needed. So I prefer to use one editor - Notepad++. It's light, it's fast, you can code in dual-panes (Have two files or even the same file opened twice in a horizontal/vertical split). There's a plugin for integrated FTP (Though I always use filezilla). It has great syntax highlighting (PM me for some decent themes). It even has code complete to some limited degree, though, I type too fast for it and it just got in the way for me.

Site management is useful but not essential. There are some plugins which give you the ability to go through files/folders, but I just use good ol' explorer

Anyway, what are you trying to code? pure html? html/js/css? php? asp/.net (Use visual studio express in that case)? ruby? python??

Woah, cheers for all the replies.

Yeah, I'm gonna be doing mainly HTML/CSS/PHP stuff, bit of Javascript and AJAX. I'll check out the suggestions. So far I've tried Aptana studio and it's really great, but I'm gonna check out the other suggestions soon incase there's something even better

I use Espresso for the Mac
It's really nice actually, it can do HTML/CSS/JS but that's just simple stuff really...

Depends on what language you are doing things in really.
I also enjoy TextMate and BBEdit too for text editing purposes they're really good.

RyanPridgeon, go with VIM, works with everything you code, lightweight as hell, great highlight syntax and commands!

Cheers!