Last semester in Object Oriented Programming I touched on this subject a bit in my blog there, but now that I've gotten the chance to assess this subject from a group's perspective, I thought I would give it another shot.
Both editors and IDE's (Interactive Development Environments) have their place. People will moan over how editors are "so superior" to IDE's in every way, but the simple truth is that some things are just better done in a full blown IDE. In smaller projects and most projects done by myself, I will choose to do them with vim (the best editor :) ). I can search and/or replace faster than you can blink, I can move around the document painlessly, and basically any unix machine around will have it. Combine it with a terminal multiplexer like tmux, (which is also installed on all the CS linux machines thanks to me) and you have got yourself a serious development setup.
The thing is though, this really only works for small jobs. When I say small, I mean within a week, maybe a couple weeks of time to finish a project. I love working with vim, but when the projects get large with oodles of different files and formats, using a terminal with a lighweight editor just for the hell of it can get a little cumbersome. The truth is that the developers of these IDE's just put too many awesome features in them for the large scale projects to pass up. In a group environment often times some people just are not extremely comfortable with editors yet, and to be honest they can be a little intimidating to some who are not used to them.
The current project for Software Engineering calls for the creation of an XML schema, an XML file which uses the schema, and the translation of the xml into Google App models, which will be used to display web pages interfacing with the models. In my experience, it is extremely important to establish the environments the group will be working with early on so that each member of the group can help each other with any environment problems, and so the rest of the time can be spent working on developing.
So what did we choose? Eclipse of course! In our case, we chose Eclipse for Java EE Developers, which is really an Eclipse package which includes a ton of awesome tools for Web Development. Eclipse is cross-platform, so we can use it on our Linux, Windows, and OS X machines without a problem. We then all installed eGit, which is a Git plugin for Eclipse so we can communicate with our Git repository on GitHub. This really made the creation of the XML a breeze and allowed us all the ability to essentially work in the same environment regardless of what systems we were running. We also installed the PyDev plugin for eclipse and the Google App SDK so we could also run whatever Python code we needed from within Eclipse. As an extra touch I also installed a vi-binding plugin so that I could get a similar feel to vim within Eclipse.
Could we have done this all in our own separate environments? Probably. Could we have done it as quickly? Questionable. Granted, it did take me quite a bit of time to establish what I thought would be a good environment for the team based on my experience, but it definitely paid off. We were able to work in a more uniform manner, communicate more effectively, and use some awesome new tools!
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