Open Source Platform Tools
Open source serves as a platform for developers to build on and with. When I was starting, the state of the art tools were gcc, emacs (or vi depending on which way you batted), and make. Those tools are still de rigeur in the low-level close-to-the-operating-system world, but as open source extends into other areas we're seeing better tools emerge.
For example, Eclipse has a strong position in the Java developer community. There are Eclipse plugins for languages like Perl, Python, PHP, etc. but they haven't taken off. That community seems split between the old text editors and a handful of specialist tools like Activestate's tools. Speaking of specialist, I see Textmate has a lot of traction in the Mac-using-Ruby-developing world, though Coda is getting a lot of buzz there lately.
Open source debugging tools hadn't seen much advance over the years until valgrind took the world by storm, making it really easy to find memory errors and profile your program's performance. Solaris's DTrace is the killer advance of the last few years. Similarly, Firebug has become a must-have tool for web developers.
I was thinking of this today because Robert O'Callahan (Foo Camper, Mozilla developer, and all-round interesting person) has finished the initial release of chronicle recorder. This is a valgrind-based tool that lets you ask time-based queries of your code ("what was the last piece of code to write to location L before time T", "show me the state of the execution stack at time T"). In his blog post on the launch, Robert thanks Novell who let him work on it while he was employed there and let him release it after he left.
Bryan O'Sullivan drew my attention to a blog post about DATE2007 and the concurrency discussion there. There's an interesting point in there about compilers--gcc is still not awfully sophisticated, and there's room again for business to have better compilers and sell their better technology until open source catches up. This raises the pleasing prospect of open source software getting faster in the future as distros and apps are compiled using better tools.
What areas have you felt the need for better tools in? Leave your wishlist in the comments. I'd love to hear of any tools that have been of particular help to you that other people could benefit from learning about and using ...
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I'd really like to see project management portals like SourceForge integrate some more modern tools. For example, most of my students use IM instead of email, but IRC and other forms of chat aren't built into SF, CollabNet, etc.
Textmate itself is not open source, though it can be extended by users via bundles ("A bundle is a collection of macros, commands, snippets, drag commands, templates, preferences, and language grammars"), and many useful bundles are user-contributed.
Don't want to start a my editor is better than yours flame but, I think the correct formulation would be "different (specialized) tools emerging".
I kept trying to play around with Eclipse and the Perl plugin, EPIC, but never really stuck with it. Recently, I discovered Aptana. Since it's based off of Eclipse, you can install plug-ins, such as EPIC. I'm on a Windows box and it has become my Perl, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc. editor of choice. I've began dabbling in Ruby again and will be using Aptana for that as well.
I actually think Eclipse is doing pretty well with the PHP and Ruby folks. The Eclipse PHP IDE project is one of our more popular projects; in addition PHPEclipse seems to have a good community. In the Ruby community, Aptana is a project to watch. They recently took over development of the RDT and RadRails projects.
btw, a lot of people don't realize but the Eclipse C/C++ IDE project is very popular for embedded and device developers.
I'm beginning to appreciate Eclipse and the EPIC plugin more and more. It is still young, but I see it maturing. It is still a bit slow at times, but for those of us who really like the 'visual' style of development it is a nice alternative.
I especially appreciate the
EasyEclipse LAMP
bundle that rolls in a number of plugins for you. Eclipse has a lot of potential.
-MC
The main editor at SilverStipe is Eclipse (writing PHP), and while every editor out there has your pet peeves, I guess this is the one that currently has the least :P
In fact, Nat, the TV show of us earlier this week has footage of my staff clearly using Eclipse ... woo :P
I still have UltraEdit installed so that when I need to quickly dash in and edit a text file, I don't have to wait ages for it to load. Its the same that I have lightweight image tools because I hate the sluggish load of Photoshop.
I want to know why it seems so hard to do good reporting and montoring of linux servers. There are a bunch of tools out there that profess to the job, but everyone time I can be bothered wasting a day to evaluate them, I find some deadend, like a debian package conflict, or the report doesn't do what I want, or it is far too bloated and bogs the server down, etc. For instance, something to total the traffic of an apache2 server running lots of virtualhosts (a bit like an awstats aggregator), or graphing/logging ethernet traffic.
Finally, someone needs to figure out how to provide the added flexibility and neat features of Word/Excel 2007; put them in open office and I'll be grateful to ditch MS Office...
I fear Eclipse going closed source some day. Greed greed.... Although I use Eclipse for heaving Java/J2EE stuffs. It's just awesome. :)
Debugging?
You wanna know what's hot in debugging?
The Omniscient Debugger!
'Cause it knows everything. Through all of time.
Wanna see every value X ever had? The entire history of your program? Slam dunk.
Sounds like valgrind does a little bit of this. I do a lot of this. :-)
-Bil
See the papers & distribution: www.LambdaCS.com
I think that the best open-source web-developer tool i'm using today is the Firefox extensión WebDeveloper (http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/)... its has everything from CSS, through source/generated code to validation of different things a website could need. And it's very simple to use too.
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Nick Lothian [05.02.07 04:17 AM]
I'm a heavy Eclipse user, doing more & more Javascript stuff - and I miss the refactoring support Eclipse has more than anything.
I love Firebug, but I think that Javascript debugging tools still have long way to go