So much to say, since I've hated website development from the moment I laid eyes on Perl/Kerberos.
Problem 1: Choosing an IDE
This has been an epic decision...In the end, I've settled on a PDT-Eclipse-Zend Debugger all-in-one from Zend. This doesn't use Zend Studio, which is a $400 product that doesn't appear to do anything significantly better than PDT--as least for the stuff I plan to use it for.
I've had to do a lot to get things working, though, on both the client and server sides.
* Get the all-in-one package.
* Install Eclipse plugins JSEclipse (from Adobe Labs), Subversive (from eclipse.org), SVN connectors (from Polarion).
* Install SVN on the server (1.6.x) from source. No big deal.
* Install SVN on the client (1.6.x for MacOS X). Not a big deal once you find the binary .dmg file.
* But, to get the server-side SVN installation working, I had to get SQLite...So I did. And installed it from source. Again, no biggie.
* Then, SVN would compile and install.
[We now take a break so I can rant about why I chose the Zend-provided PDT all-in-one...]
So, the problem with Zend is that it didn't offer too much that was a big deal. Sure, it might be nice to have custom PHP-formatting. But that doesn't seem like a $400 advantage. Then, using bare Eclipse/Ganymede and trying to install PDT was terrible, because some of the dependencies for Zend Debugger were broken, and WTF good is PDT without the Zend Debugger?
Exactly.
So, I tried getting the PDT all-in-one from Zend.
That worked. So, I'm sticking with it.
[...and now we return to our regularly scheduled program.]
JSEclipse is nice, so it seems. But, you had to hook up JS files to be opened with JSEclipse. Again, not too bad, once you find the install directions.
Then, I tried installed the Subversive plugin. I'm familiar with Subclipse (from tigris.org). So, I figured, how hard could Subversive be? Ha! Well, after installing Subversive, I wasn't able to connect to any SVN repositories because the "SVN Connector" was missing. I had to hop over to polarion.com to get the connector plugins. And, even then, it didn't work. No one mentioned that the pure-Java SVNkit was the addon I needed.
Finally, after all of that, I can connect. One feature I like so far is the ability to "automagically" check out only the trunk of a project, because it will "detect project structure" and do "smart things" if it seems the usual TTB directories (trunk, tags, branches).
