this question, though has nothing to do with the programming stuff, gets me bugged while I try to delve deeper a bit. I am confused with what this IDE means. somewhere it says its an editor or somewhere like its some PHP editor. I use dreamweaver normally and notepad ++ occasionally .. Is this what IDE is ? or is that I have misunderstood things.??
+3
A:
An integrated development environment is generally a whole bunch of tools integrated into one.
This includes editor, compiler, debugger and whatever other tools you may want to add.
Back in pre-history, we used to use an editor to edit the files, then we would exit and use a compiler, then a linker to produce the final product (actually, when I first started, we used punch cards and 80x25 data entry sheets and handed them to data entry operators for input into the computer, but I don't want to bore the youngsters among you).
Nowadays we just press the F5 key or, if you use Emacs,
CTRLALTMETAOPEN-APPLEATTNLEFT-SHIFTRIGHT_SHIFTB
while holding our heads inclined at an angle of 22.5o to the Earth's magnetic field and biting the head off a chicken :-)
Some IDEs (such as Eclipse) provide a plug-in environment where people can create plug-ins to add many tools to the standard ones. Think in terms of:
- source code control and versioning.
- support for multiple (computer) languages.
- refactoring tools.
- direct publishing of applications to environments (such as EAR files to an application server).
- extraction of strings for internationalisation
and so on, ad near infinitum.
paxdiablo
2010-10-14 07:27:47
so is it that IDE is an age old concept ??? right now we write down the codes in an editor(say dreamweaver) and refresh the page in the browser to get the output ??
Sachindra
2010-10-14 07:31:47
That's one way but it's not really integrated (except by the fact that you open the editor and the browser) - you have to remember to save the file then switch to the browser, relaod, switch back and so on. Integrated would mean something like pressing a key from within the editor and a browser session starts automatically loading your file (and compiling any needed code - I have no idea whether Dreamweaver needs compilation or not).
paxdiablo
2010-10-14 07:34:11
huh .. that would make things really lesser tedious and faster as well???? thks ....
Sachindra
2010-10-14 07:37:18
+1
A:
Think; everything you need to write, build, run, and debug your application in one program.
Ed Swangren
2010-10-14 07:28:40