Development Tools

I recently finished a project which involved HTML, Javascript and PHP along
with MySQL.

The only development tool was FrontPage. Now I actually like FrontPage and
this is not a diatribe against this development tool or Microsoft. I've been
around to long to waste my time on that sort of thing.

The choice of HTML, Javascript and PHP along with MySQL was only partially
mine. I did not realize how difficult it was to work with all of these in
combination until I was in the middle of it.

Now that this is done (for now), it strikes me a different development
environment was needed. The whole thing came down to write some code, hurl
it up on the web site, let it fail, isolate the failure, and then move on. I
am more use to debugging in increasing larger chunks (lines of code,
routines, modules, etc). I also dearly miss being able to single step
through code verifing all of the varibles as we go along. This may not be
the latest greatest way to do it but I;ve been doing it this way since 1962.
Teaching old dogs new tricks is a pain in the wazz.

To the point, I will appreciate suggestions on development software and
development methodology using this language combination or any others.

Pease

Frank

tooheys@fullchannel.net

There are a pretty full set of tools for development and debugging of JSP/Java. Some of the IDE debuggers will allow you to load
tomcat right into the debugger and you can set break points and soforth. I personally don't care for PHP, but a lot of people do.
When I program JSP I put all actual business logic in JavaBeans and the JSP portion only does display formatting. The best way to do
that is via JSP Custom Tags so that the actual Java syntax is hidden from the HTML developers.

Just my .02

Dennis

ft310 wrote:
> I recently finished a project which involved HTML, Javascript and PHP along
> with MySQL.
>
> The only development tool was FrontPage. Now I actually like FrontPage and
> this is not a diatribe against this development tool or Microsoft. I've been
> around to long to waste my time on that sort of thing.
>
> The choice of HTML, Javascript and PHP along with MySQL was only partially
> mine. I did not realize how difficult it was to work with all of these in
> combination until I was in the middle of it.
>
> Now that this is done (for now), it strikes me a different development
> environment was needed. The whole thing came down to write some code, hurl
> it up on the web site, let it fail, isolate the failure, and then move on. I
> am more use to debugging in increasing larger chunks (lines of code,
> routines, modules, etc). I also dearly miss being able to single step
> through code verifing all of the varibles as we go along. This may not be
> the latest greatest way to do it but I;ve been doing it this way since 1962.
> Teaching old dogs new tricks is a pain in the wazz.
>
> To the point, I will appreciate suggestions on development software and
> development methodology using this language combination or any others.
>
> Pease
>
> Frank
>
> tooheys@fullchannel.net
>
>