Wednesday, October 16, 2002

I’ve been looking for development platforms for Linux. While it seems to have some pretty good tools for server-based applications, software development still all seems to be text-based. So I went looking for GUI IDEs. There are lots of them, of varied maturity and features.

Kylix is promising: C++ and Delphi/Pascal.

“Komodo is optimized for Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl, and XSLT, and runs on Windows and Linux. ” according to http://www.activestate.com/Products/Komodo/index.plex. [URL updated, 16 years later, to a very different IDE]

Metroworks has ported their popular CodeWarrior to Linux: C++ and Java.

And there are some home-grown categories, too, such as Code Crusader.

Joe Barr had an interesting column about IDEs in June 1999 Linux Journal:
http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-06/lw-06-vcontrol_1.html

I’d really like to see VB/Access/VFP type GUIs, with toolbars, palettes, drag-drop and snippets, but that may still be a ways off.