Boredworkers.com

I dunno… I’m really starting to lose faith in commercial IDEs. I use a certain Macromedia (now Adobe) PHP editor (go figure!) to weave my dreams of a perfect web application (pun pushed to the max).

I’m trying to replace my PHP short tags with proper ones. Yes, I’m trying to trawl through my entire codebase for these <? rag-tags (ha) and transform them into elegant <?php beauties. I know that instead of looking for them manually the best way is to use my IDE’s “find” function and enter a regular expression for the <? tags.

After looking at an awesome regular expression tutorial I decided that a great string to feed into the “find” utility was ^<\?$. Great, I was set to go. Well, guess what… I was so utterly disappointed to be greeted with a “Done.Not found in 268 documents” report after querying my code folder. Just to be sure, I opened up one of the PHP files and lo and behold, I found at least one short tag. Sigh!I was really frustrated. Well, at the back of my mind was that thought that the regular expression could still be right. I quickly switched over to my beloved open-source text editor, jEdit. Sure, being a desktop Java app, it’s not the speediest, but I think it’s one heckuva editor. Anyway, I entered the same ^<\?$ regular expression. Lo and behold, I received a pleasant “Hypersearch” window with the first line, “36 occurences in 14 files”. I even could see the file and line number for every instance of the regexp. I felt so good I decided to quickly put this little piece up on Boredworkers.com.

I think it’s really bad of Macromedia to ship a product that will be a core part of developers’ working lives and yet produce such a crap tool. I try very hard to give this IDE a chance, to convince myself that it’s worth the expensive price tag, but, “dang!” it more than often lets me down. Yes, I can understand that the engineers have shipping deadlines and that the jEdit team don’t, but that’s no excuse for a world-class organisation to crank out such an unreliable product. Now that Adobe has taken over, I hope things will work out for the better. In the meantime, I will not be leaning on this commercial IDE alone to help me get my projects done. I say, “Go jEdit, KDevelop, KWrite, Vim and other excellent software artefacts out there! Put ‘em greedy US software companies to shame!” I also hope this post will convince people that we open-source-lovin’ people aren’t Linux Nazis.

(Now all I have to do is set aside some cash to donate to the jEdit project, which means talking to my financial director at home :P)