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- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14OMG, Linux can edit text files too! Really hard to switch!
However, you need to run Internet Explorer in Wine or keep a Windows machine around so you can hack around IE's brain-dead core in every second line of JS. The developers of IE should be fired, fired again and then executed for the horrible crap they unleashed on the world. "They were just following orders" didn't work for the Nazis.
Oh, I'm sorry, was I ranting? - oxyrubber, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9> "Did it work?"
>
> Ah, the question commonly in use for any aspect of Linux.
This only applies when you are QA testing on IE and Safari (since those browsers aren't available for Linux). Developing on Linux gets you trained to use only cross-browser standards (cross-browser can include DesignMode and XMLHttpRequest, given certain error-checking/handling). Handling IE should always be an afterthought since IE is the one browser notorious for breaking standards. Use a CVS connection to a Windows box and test IE through your Linux browser.
Building on Firefox and then special-case handling on IE ALWAYS takes less time than building for IE and special case-handling for the standards compliant browsers. It also trains you to solve your problems within the standards and not to look for IE hacks... which is death for a cross-browser designer.
If you are trying to generalize this type of re-training, you certainly do not understand what Linux is about. Stick to the standards (POSIX, ASCII, ISO, and... for web development... W3C) and you will be fine. - keesj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7why use a mirror at all? it's (still) working
- ylikone, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I am a web developer and switched my main work desktop to Linux in 2000. Haven't looked back. I do still keep an XP box around for testing final products on IE as well.
- motionblur, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Quick link for part one:
http://mondaybynoon.com/2006/07/03/linux-and-web-development-intro/ - drag, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4He was talking about TESTING the websites he makes with different browsers.
Remember it's web development, so he needs to make sure that it works using various browsers so he needs to have Safari, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Opera, and Firefox to test the common rendering engines.
His point about talking about Konquerer is how suitable as a Safari test case is it (since they both use the same engines) - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I find it odd the author doesn't mention firefox as a linux browser option but mentions firefox in the ftp section so its obvious that he does use firefox.
- drag, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4The simpliest thing to solve that in my opinion is one of 2 ways.
Vmware -- if you don't have a Windows box handy.
Rdesktop -- if your have a Windows xp pro or Windows 2000 pro handy or aviable.
And like the article stated he was happily using Internet Explorer in Linux without a virtual machine using Wine. The only downside to is that IE 7 isn't supported well yet. Personally I like using remote desktop since it's actually running in Windows so you don't run into any compatability issues.
Just saying. There are a veriaty of ways to run needed Windows applications in Linux. It's only a big pain in the rear when you got to run lots of them. One or two isn't a big deal. - drag, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4""This wouldn't make sense if the author's production environment was IIS 6.0 with PHP installed contacting an Oracle database.""
Egad man, that doesn't make sense in itself. Both Oracle and PHP work out better on Linux so the only reason you'd want to run that is the sake of using IIS 6.. and Apache is much more capable and inexpensive so the idea of that is just scary. - harrykipper, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4quite strange that the guy leaves out a couple of really cool pieces of software:
1- Web Developer extension for Firefox, IMHO the best free tool for webdevs. EditCSS is *really* a key tool even in a windows environment.
2-Screem: more stable and feature-rich than Bluefish, includes the inline dropdown menu as Quanta and DW do. - distancestudios, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I've struggled over the decision of whether I want to swap to Linux over Windows. Glad to see someone else went through the same problems.
- willcode4beer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3weak.
Every professional web developer I know uses Linux for development.
Testing is handled using VNC and VMWare. Using a 2nd box with VMWare, you can have multiple versions of windows and IE versions. Each of those runs VNC so, you can access any of them from the primary Linux desktop. Having a half dozen combinations an alt-tab away keeps development efficient. This also makes dealing with internationalization a lot easier.
Anthor benefit with VMWare, is you can always restore the test virtual system to any state of upgrade needed.
Linux for dev is chosen simply because it is a developer friendly environemnt. You could always put Cygwin on some windows box but, its never quite the same. Being able to SCP files, resize images, connect to multiple remote boxes with just a few keystrokes, what's not to love. Sure the learning curve is high, and you need to know a lot of stuff, that just comes with being a "professional". - jackkerouac, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3NVu is crap - it doesn't handle PHP and it's not even being developed any more. I run Ubuntu and use Photoshop in VMWare under XP and Dreamweaver 8.0 under Wine.
Everything works great and it's the best of both worlds. - mchase, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It's mentioned in the comments that IE7 works in IEs4Linux now.
- bobzibub, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4They do web dev on Windows too?
Who'd a thought!
; ) - afrazkhan, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5
@slashdotislame,
So sorry, but that is nonsense. It would be accurate to say that _most_ people use IE, but chances are good that there are more than a few people in your office that don't, including your boss, and especially if you work for a tech company. You are left in a poor position when one of them (maybe your bosses boss even) points out that it doesn't work in _his_ browser, since by that time, it's probably gotten the green light to go live.
oxyrubber is right. Design to standards, and fit IE in afterwards. There's really no point in alienating over 20% of users (including other browsers than FF), and it makes you look bad. The days when your argument of "well it works in IE so screw the rest" was feasible are over, thank goodness. - ldog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Vmware Server(formerly GSX) is free (beer not speech).
ESX & Workstation are the pay versions.
And you can create VMs with Server that work on the other products. - earlycj5, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2When using Quanta I prefer to use the built in FTP function. Pretty nice to just right click and tell it to "quick upload" rather than using a seperate FTP client.
- warble, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Quanta runs under KDE, which has KIOSlaves.. So you can load and save directly to a remote server over FTP using the normal file dialog in any KDE app. Or by using the fish:// protocol, you can (shudder) do it encrypted so you aren't broadcasting your password to the whole world.
The only thing I can think of in this type of development that Linux doesn't do as well as other things is having a WYSIWYG HTML editor like Dreamweaver. However, it works great for me under wine, so I guess it does that too.
Oh, and the photoshop deal, but I don't use Photoshop, I hate the concept of layers personally, and I'm not a graphics designer, so I'm a bad person to get an opinion about that. Fireworks is more my cup of tea for web graphics. - mchase, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I believe he mentions WebDev toolbar in another article. I'm a firm believer in the extension too, I'd be lost without it sometimes.
- petepete, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I don't work on the fancy graphics side of things and am fairly productive on my linux box (mainly using vi, RapidSVN, meld, pgAdmin3, ruby, php, perl... occasionally eclipse, bluefish, cssed).
From a design point of view though, I don't know how we'd cope without PS. - gharding, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I can work on pretty much any common platform. However, I'm a web developer, not a designer. If I can run screen, vim or emacs, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, Oracle, mySQL, and pgSQL, I can do all my work on it. If I designed, I'd sorely miss Photoshop because the Gimp is hell. I'd hope that any serious web developer would be able to at least lightly admin and use just about any kind of common unix machine.
- ldog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Forgot to add, VM Server is ok for running windows emulated.
Just connect to your localhost, you can even get sound to work.
The ies4linux thing in the article is really cool too. I just installed it, should save me from even having to use vmware when I just need to test something in IE. - kebagami, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The right tools for the right job. Mirror your production environment as much as possible. This wouldn't make sense if the author's production environment was IIS 6.0 with PHP installed contacting an Oracle database.
- nixfu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2You can create images for the free vmplayer on various websites.. no need to buy anything to use vmware.
- willcode4beer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1jelly, if you are a professional, tossing out a few hundred bucks for VMWare is more than made up with time saved.
Hell, take restoring a virtual machine compared with re-installing (or ghosting) a real one. With VMWare it can be done in a matter of seconds. At $85/hour, you only have to do it once or twice to make up the cost compared to re-installing windows.
If you work for free and/or your time has no value, then maybe you wouldn't want to shell out the money. - willcode4beer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1also left out
IBM WSAD, Eclipse, MyEclipse..... - richmulhern, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Honestly though, what kind of web development is this guy even doing? I use a Linux box when doing PHP because it doesn't make sense for me to do it on a windows box if it's just going to end up going on the Linux one anyways. Also I do my ruby and rails work on the Linux box too. Rails on windows just seems like it's trying to be rails on a Linux box and I thinks its annoying. If I was doing ASP.NET I'd do it on a windows machine.
Besides that it doesn't matter what you are on. There's no reason to sway from one OS to produce JavaScript, HTML, or XML files. Any OS has the adequate tools. Congrats on switching and going for it, but this article doesn't provide any insight in how Linux makes it better just what common tools you can use to adapt to the new environment. - punterfpc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You can do that in almost any decent GUI known to man... Windows does it (Aero too...), you can do it in gnome, KDE, MacOSX, I don't see why you specifically mention the compz/glx setup...
ATI and Nvidia... - mchase, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Directly from the article itself:
"Quanta Plus is an editor based partly on Kate, therefore inheriting Kate’s speed and versatility." - mchase, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The editor he mentions in the post, Quanta Plus, has built in CVS support. That's similar to the syncing dreamweaver does but better because it keeps track of all changes.
- bieber, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've been doing professional web development on a GNU/Linux box for something like six months now. My biggest problem was having to basically relearn doing graphics with the Gimp, but now that I'm getting to be mostly proficient with it, I've really not got any problems. It's not _as good_ as Photoshop, but doing graphics for a site, it's more knowledge of the techniques that matters--anyone who knows how to do it _can_ do it with the Gimp, it's just a matter of learning. That, and it would be nice if I could get IE7 to work. Reading that blog post linked to in the article as we speak...
- bonked, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@punterfpc
Please explain how I can do that in KDE and Gnome - because I can't seem to get the screen to rotate around so I can see the far right hand side of the window that is as wide as two screens.
Yes, you can switch desktops, and have different apps running on each desktop, but you can't have apps "stretch" across them. Obviously you have not used XGL/Compiz. - mchase, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Apparently it also has FTP support so... Dreamweaver still loses.
- willcode4beer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"designer == developer"
lol - Casedot, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I like how with compz/glz you can extend a text file across multiple desktops, so if you dont like using word wrap all you need to do is switch to the second desktop. It works great for me. Not being able to test in IE sucks, but can't you use wine or cedega, or even a virtual machine? You can also use online code testers to see if it works in IE, but I have never done so.
- vh1`, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I'm starting to question this guy's legitness
he says code folding and current line highlighting are features of quanta, when they're really features from the kate kpart. and he knows of konqueror's existence. but somehow chooses a firefox extension over the ftp:// kioslave - punterfpc, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Look guys, obviously anyone with a brain can program a web site/application using ONLY a text editor. However, if you are uploading remotely to a shared server of in BFE, it pays to have the FTP and sync tools that Dreamweaver offers. Sure, you could do it by hand with an ftp client, but why go through the hassle? You could use command-line syncing tools within the Linux terminal over ssh (if you are lucky enough to have it with your plan), but, not everyone has that option.
If you are serving it yourself like, this guy is, then it's really no big deal. But, MOST people don't serve their own sites.
Web design and/or web site management is not really logical on Linux yet because there are programs designed to make all the work you would do in Linux so much easier.
Bottom Line...
-- Linux doesn't have Photoshop, and the gimp for all intents and purposes blows...
-- Linux doesn't have Dreamweaver or any other decent digital assets management tool (that I know of...)
Linux is great for LAMP not development (yet...). However, I am actually impressed with Nvu. Check it out if you haven't heard of it. - illicium, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1I'm a musician, web designer, and Java/C/C++/PHP/AJAX programmer. While I can install Linux and be happy with a text terminal and vim, there's obviously some things that need to be done professionally, yet, unfortunately, Linux software is just not up to par to industry standard (yet). Take Cubase SX, Photoshop for example; there are rough OSS equivalents, but it's still totally not the same.
- jellygraph, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1vmware is free? since when? i know that the vmware player is free, but you need an image to run off. and vmware server... but thats not all too useful either for the purpose of running windows emulated... so im stuck with qemu then
- i440, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2"Building on Firefox and then special-case handling on IE ALWAYS takes less time than building for IE and special case-handling for the standards compliant browsers."
Ideally though, wouldn't you develop for Opera at first? It has the best standards compliance AFAIK. - 0siris, on 10/12/2007, -10/+4When my windows box went down (harddrive) i installed ubunutu on a 13 gb i had lying around, and started doing my web developement on it (php/mysql and ajax). For the most part i found it as good, until it was time to test for IE. Like it or not, if you dont test for IE you might as well not make a site.
- i440, on 10/12/2007, -11/+4"Did it work?"
Ah, the question commonly in use for any aspect of Linux. - slashdotislame, on 10/12/2007, -12/+5to Oxygrubber.
Nice idea in theory, but...
Your boss uses IE.
Your customers use IE.
Everyone uses IE.
Your site doesn't work. 90% of people will think you suck at websites.
You don't get a raise. - JeremyBanks, on 10/12/2007, -9/+2Why not just use http://www.duggmirror.com?
- yourowndisaster, on 10/12/2007, -11/+3Direct Mirror
http://www.yourowndisaster.com/mirror/mondaybynoon.com/2006/09/11/linux-and-web-development-part-2/
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