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.

Subversion support is a recent addition to Coda and it works well. I still find it more reliable to do high volume operations from the command line, but for ongoing code changes the way Coda shows you what’s changed and what needs to be added to your repository is pretty damn good.

Coda also supports multi-file search and Regex search. Both of which can also do replace. You don’t appreciate the value of these features until you need them. There is also support for snippets and the latest major release also supports plug-ins. So the text-manipulation capabilities of Coda are now able to grow beyond what the Panic developers have time to do. Coda supports FTP and SFTP and allows for live-editing of a site’s files right on the server. This is also something one doesn’t appreciate until one needs it.

For $99, Coda is a solid investment. I’ve built everything from small client sites to medium sized WordPress and Joomla CMS sites to very large PHP-mySQL and Rails sites with it, and Coda has come through every time. I have never hit a case where I had to say “it won’t let me do that” on something I was working on. Which is what an IDE should be able to claim.

But …

There are a lot of times where I need to do a small site for a client and I don’t need a big IDE. I need something small that can deploy the small site to possibly several domain installations (for proofing or mirroring). I still want to be able to edit and browse the files on the server, but I don’t need the project management. And it has to be fast.

The latest MacHeist served up Espresso, by MacRabbit (makers of the excellent CSSEdit). Espresso uses project files instead of a built-in project manager … which is actually what I wanted since the number of projects I have floating around kind of overwhelms Coda’s interface. Rather than use conventional tabs, Espresso uses a list of open files and previews. This takes a little getting used to, but it actually works better than tabs once you gave more than a dozen files open.

As expected, the CSS editor is great in Espresso. The code editor is also very good, with inteligent tag completion and all that good stuff. The system is extensible by “sugars” so as this gets into more developers hands I expect the language support to continue to improve, much as it did with TextMate.

Snippets are supported, but no Subversion. Which is OK for what I intend to use this for. I don’t mind firing up a SVN client every few days as the need to check in isn’t as high on smaller projects. The FTP support is one thing I really love about Espresso. You can define multiple FTP sites, so you can deploy to your staging server, the client’s server, and potentially other servers as well (mirrors, portfolios, etc. etc.).  You can also browse and edit in place for each FTP desitination, which is great for quick touch-ups.

I did have a few FTP connection problems with Espresso when I was working from a hotel, Coda worked like a charm. But that was Espresso 1.0.1 … MacRabbit made stability improvements since that release, so I expect those problems are gone now as well.

At around $80, Espresso is a little on the pricey side compared to Coda. Coda simply does more and lists for only $20 more. Had I not gotten Espresso as part of the MacHeist bundle, I might not have bothered with it. Which isn’t a knock on Espresso as a product, just that for the list price it’s hard to justify not getting Coda instead. If Espresso was closer to $40, it’d be a no-brainer to get it in addition to Coda.

Now fast-forward a couple of years. Our provider starts to have some performance issues, one of which ends up costing us half a week of down-time to move our server image to a new physical server. Support starts to get slow and, while responsive, we get the impression that they’d rather we figure stuff out on our own. They have great technology and, if we were a large company with a full IT staff, it’d be great fun to play with.

But we’re not. We’re a small outfit where everyone does 3 or 4 or 20 jobs and messing around with complex server configurations is simply not good for business. Every hour one of our developers spends trying to configure the server is an hour they’re not spending writing code.

So we just recently moved the whole deal over to Engine Yard. In a word, I was astounded by the reception we received. For starters, their slice hosting comes with free accounts on GitHub (Git hosting), Beanstalk (SVN hosting), Lighthouse (ticket/project-management system), and New Relic (application analytics). So basically all the services we needed, or were paying for elsewhere, were now included in our basic hosting fees. Email is hosted on MailTrust – which works pretty well, even though it’s based on a Microsoft platform. But using MailTrust we can suddenly send email to people on AOL, so that’s a good thing.

Freebies aside, the real impressive event came when I started moving stuff over. A lot of the administrative chores and other minutia are handled by the EY staff. Submit a ticket to change a DNS record, install an application, or whatever and they handle it for you. Tickets get answered within 10 minutes with at least an acknowledgment. EY provides you with all your login credentials for you slices, static IP address ready to roll, and environment files for running Capistrano deployments. Outside of learning how to use Capistrano, it couldn’t have been much easier.

As I started getting our application running, I hit various configuration issues along the way. Mostly this was due to gems not being installed but sometimes it was things in our code which had to change. At one point I hit a problem which just baffled me. Rails was saying a class wasn’t defined when clearly it was. I threw the problem over to EY and an hour later they told me what was wrong. It was a configuration problem because we didn’t have a “staging” environment on our prior hosting setup – the missing setting was ultimately what was causing the class to not load (sure would be nice if Rails gave a more useful message, huh?).

What was really amazing was the EY tech’ spent an hour going through our code to find the problem. He could haev just spouted some canned answer from the KnowledgeBase (which is what I’m used to from ISP’s). But no. He actually analyzed our code and found a very subtle problem and told me how to fix it. That’s nothing short of amazing from a support organization. Imagine taking your new car back to the dealership and telling the service manager that you’re having trouble down-shifting into first and, rather than throw a “Driving For Dummies” book at you, he comes out from behind the desk and teaches you how to heel-and-toe downshift.

Jim Clark at the 'Ring

Once the gems were all installed and the configuration problems worked out. The application fired up on Staging just fine. Then simply install the same gems on the Production slice, copy the latest database image, and “cap production deploy” from my MacBookPro and – bingo – we’re running on a new host. I flipped the DNS a day later, EY made the necessary additions to their nameservers within 5 minutes of my ticket informing them of the move.

Just awesome. So, the bottom line is that if you’re looking for Rails hosting and want everything you need to deploy a commercial application from one vendor, plus incredible support, at a reasonable price – you just can’t beat Engine Yard. With their support it’d be a bargain at twice the price because you don’t need to hire an IT guy to manage the servers.