Website Development Trials

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).