I think almost all programmers, and web developers aren’t any different kind of them, come at one point to the situation when they have to build their work environment. From what you can see on various web sites usually they divide into two groups:

• Vim advocates
• IDE fans

I have to admit that for a long time I belonged to the first part – I was using basic text editor, all I needed was syntax coloring and ftp features. Then one day I started to work for Foothold and they wanted me to use Zend Studio. They even were so generous that they provided the license at no cost to me :-).

At the beginning it was pretty hard to get used to that system. It was written in Java. As you know the only advantage of Java (especially on slower machines) is it’s cross-platform nature. It took me almost three months to finally get all thing working, including the finally bought secondary monitor and faster computer with more RAM (if you don’t have at least 768MB it will freeze from time to time). But now the work is almost a pleasure.

More – I can’t imagine developing ANY more complicated site (like CMS or mentioned above A.W.A.R.D.S system) without the variable watchers, breakpoints, step by step debugging.

It’s like Polish way of driving cars – everybody prefer stick shift until they actually try the automatic one.

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