[Nottingham] Cross platform IDE's

[Martin Garton]

On Mon, 2007-02-19 at 16:09 +0000, stellafan at jjsh.org wrote:

> So, other than the 3 previously mentioned, any suggestions for further
> reading? (sorry if this is a bit rambly ~ been up all night recovering a
> clients Exchange system!)

Personally, of those I have tried, I find eclipse to be way ahead of all
the competition.

It sounds from what you are saying though that you have a lot more to
decide than just which IDE to use.  It sounds like you have to architect
an application from the ground up, including choice of UI toolkit,
choice of database access mechanisms and policies, choice of development
language(s), possibly any available framework choices (e.g., j2ee,
spring, asp.net, ruby on rails, etc) and probably a lot more besides.

So really, the information that would be needed to make those decisions
would include developer skill sets, application complexity, scalability
requirements, UI complexity, lead times on new developments and much
much more. (For each of these points alone I could have written pages!)

A few things to consider that relate to what you have already mentioned:

.NET would not necessarily limit your desktop choice.  Mono (an open
source implementation of the same standards that Microsofts .NET
implements) is really quite mature these days and capable of running
apps on Linux, windows, macos and others without so much as a recompile.
I have personally written applications written in c# and gtk# using mono
on Linux and ran them unmodifed on windows. (both under mono on windows
and under the MS .NET vm)   Having said that I haven't seen a
particularly good .net IDE that runs on Linux yet. I'm sorry to say that
monodevelop doesn't cut it for me yet. (I don't much care personally
because I use vim mostly, but my developers like IDEs so I have that to
consider)

If using java, consider using swing as the ui technology (and really,
I'm by no means saying _do_ use it, merely consider it).  It has its
problems, but recent improvements (especially in v6) have made it a lot
better and it is now fine for many applications and gives the minimum
portability concerns of all the java based options IMO.

Finally, without more detailed information about your application, it's
hard to recommend anything in particular or to rule anything out.

It might help if you could outline the limitations of your current
approach?  I know why I wouldn't do my apps in Access, but your opinion
might help better understand what problems you are trying to solve.

-- 
Martin.

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