[thelist] Development platform

Simon Willison cs1spw at bath.ac.uk
Wed Sep 17 04:02:12 CDT 2003


Tom van Gemert wrote:
> I am currently trying to figure out my ideal (web/multimedia) 
> development platform, therefore I would like to know what you use and 
> what your preferences are. Thanks.

I'm not sure what you mean by "development platform" - are you talking 
about server technologies or productivity software?

For productivity, I favour UltraEdit from www.ultraedit.com - it's a 
powerful general purpose text editor which includes internal support for 
both FTP and SFTP (as well as a million and one other features). The 
SFTP support is particularly useful, as it allows you to open a file 
directly from a secure FTP location, edit it and hit "Ctrl + S" so save 
your changes straight back up to the site - great for making small 
tweaks (provided you're confident you aren't going to mess everything up!)

For server side technology, I stick with the open source LAMP[1] 
options. I'm currently switching focus from PHP and MySQL on Apache to 
PostgreSQL and mod_python on Apache. Python is a beautful language to 
work in, but has the disadvantage that there are a dozen or so competing 
web frameworks written in it none of which quite do what I want them to.

As for multimedia, my design talent approximates zero but when I really 
need to create a few images I tend to use Fireworks or Paint Shop Pro.

Cheers,

Simon Willison
http://simon.incutio.com/

[1] Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/Python/PHP/Postgres - www.onlamp.com



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