[lug] What Development Environments, Debuggers, also Documentation

[Zulaware]

Eclipse is the gold standard (IMO, hold the flames) for industrial-grade 
dev in Java, and it has great stepping/debugging features, but it's 
pretty heavyweight and a bit tough to jump into, but worth the extra 
time to learn. My favorite for rapid dev though has to be IBM VisualAge 
for Java, because it's actually a highly productive Smalltalk 
environment. Sadly, though it is being axed by IBM, and is *extremely* 
heavyweight and locked into outdated JDKs. I still pull it up for some 
rapid, off the cuff proofing, though.

I haven't done a lot of PHP coding, but found Maguma Studio for PHP to 
be the best I could find, mainly becuase of a full-featured debugger. 
I'm planning on really putting it through its paces soon developing an 
OSCommerce website.

Javadoc is a good baseline documentation base, but you need to realize 
that you need to follow a strict standard in documenting code for it to 
be effective. If you have an IDE that allows you to specify 
class/method/interface templates, it's well worth using. Everyplace I've 
worked, it's come under mixed use, which dilutes it's usefulness, but I 
think it should be standard, just like JUnit should be standard.

--M

Gordon Golding wrote:

>I'm going to be doing development with Java, PHP, html, a bit of javascript and POSTgres as database.  I'll be mostly on a Windows PC.
>
>Who has recommendations?
>
>I've been recommended JCreator for the Java parts and Edit+ for PHP and writing SQL directly to POSTgres.
>
>What are the best debugging environments for Java and/or PHP?
>
>Also - I think I asked this, but missed the answer.
>Documentation:
>What about JavaDoc?  Is it good?  Should I push it here?  Should it be a standard in every Java development house? 
>Thoughts? 
>  
>