Silicon Chisel

Coda

Espresso

Mac Dev Tools Worth Having

For a lot of people, the Mac is seen as the PC for a “creative person”. Very “artsy.” Now, I’ve spent years (decades) developing code on Sun workstations, DEC equipment, and PC’s – the Mac, and the tools that are available on it beat all that stuff by a wide margin.

For starters, Mac OS X is itself a Linux environment. So no more shoe-horning a WAMP environment onto a PC. It’s not needed (although I do use MAMP for the Mac because Apple chose not to install some of the standard PHP extensions as standard, but for most developers this may not be needed).

But what IDE does one run? Sure, you can install the ever-present Eclipse platform. Which is capable of pretty much anything and everything if you locate/install/configure/incant the right stuff. For me, Eclipse was just too much work to get running, too slow, and too idiosynchratic to use on a daily basis.

Thus enters Coda, by Panic. Coda combines a solid code editor, a rock-solid FTP client, a terminal, a CSS editor, Subversion, and site management in one package. If you code in Rails or work with CMS-based sites, the inclusion of a SSH terminal which remembers passwords is a life saver. No more neededing to reach for Terminal or iTerm when you need to launch mongrel or change some folder protection – just open a tab, hit the button and you’re in.

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Desktop Applications, Development Tools, Macintosh ide, Macintosh, php, ruby on rails, subversion

This week we launched the latest follow-on to find-a-therapist.com: treatment-programs.com.

This was an 80% rewrite of the old code-base. Some thought was given to going to a full-fledge PHP framework stack, but instead we opted to keep things light and simple. The Smarty template engine was used to handle the “V” side of an MVC application. This also benefited the application by providing a nice view-caching mechanism to increase performance.

Adodb’s ActiveRecord implimentation was used for the “M” part of the design. This put everything on a nice, solid database model which would also allow for migrating to some other platform should the need arise.

Throw in a splash of JQuery here and there, and some other JavaScript controls and voilà.

News active record, adodb, jquery, php, smarty

A new version of the successful psychotherapist directory - Find-a-Therapist.com - was launched this week. It features a complete rewrite from the ground up for speed, ecommerce support, and deployability across multiple platforms. A sister site for psychotherapy information - Find-a-Therapist.info - was launched as well.

News, Projects mysql, php