Sun Solaris IDE/Source Control Choices

Question

At my new job I'm getting acclimated with the IDE we have Visual SlickEdit 8.0 installed on our sun solaris workstation that we telnet into(lol yes ssh is turned off).

Now it does the basics but is missing many things I considered must haves like code hiding and parenthesis matching. Are there any alternatives to constantly ftping my work from our remote sun machine so I can edit it with a local copy of Eclipse then ftp it back. We dont' have any source control for incremental updates locally so if I overwrite my changes I'm screwed and with lots of ftping I can only assume its a matter of time before I overwrite some of my work. Any ideas or suggestions?

Answer 1

Ouch, I suggest you look into some type of Continuous Integration system ASAP! As far as version control, Subversion is pretty mature and stable, or you could go with the up and coming GIT system.

Answer 2

I think you asked two questions. One about IDE and one about a version control system. I don't know of any IDEs that have good support for distributed development onto a system that has only a telnet connection.

I would recommend a very fast, lightweight version control system. Then use your local IDE, and "push" your changes to the Solaris box for building. That's the simplest answer.

Actually you might be a primate candidate for a new feature in NetBeans 6.5 called "Remote Development". NetBeans also supports development of C/C++ programs using gcc/gdb or Sun cc/dbx. Remote development is designed for this situation. You can edit your files on one machine and build/run them on another machine. I think it works best with NFS access between the two machines, I'm not sure it's smart enough to "push" changes using source control when you need to udpate the remote host. I haven't tried it much myself, but you might want to look into it.

Answer 3

As for a native IDE to supplement/replace your existing solution, you have a few choices if you can run a local X server:

• Sun Studio

  Free "express" edition, or free full version for Sun Developer Network members.

• Eclipse

  Allegedly multi-platform, but a Solaris package is no longer available at eclipse.org. However Blastwave does provide a Solaris package (and the multiple dependencies that you will also require).

• Netbeans

  Native Solaris package, FOSS, supports many languages: http://www.netbeans.org/. Has strong backing and some nice features (eg Java GUI designer).

• Vim

  Only for the die-hard UNIXer :) There is an older version of vim available on the Solaris Companion CD, otherwise the usual places have more recent packages. The best thing that can be said for this solution is that it's lightweight and will work directly over your telnet (ick) connection without needing you to export X11.

Answer 4

Can't answer the IDE question, but for source control, I can heartily recommend GIT. We've recently transitioned from CVS to GIT in our Solaris environment, and it's excellent. We should have done it sooner.