Comments on: Reader Feedback: Macs as a Superior Development Platform?

By: Nick Santilli

Nick Santilli — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:26:54 +0000

Wow – thank you for so many great comments. This is definitely the valuable feedback I expected out of our great readers. My apologies for the long delay in responding. This post dropped while I was on vacation, and then upon return I had to dig out from under all of my bajillions of emails that awaited me. I’m finally back to being a contributing member of society again.

Anyhow, that’s everyone for the feedback. Sounds like I really need to check out Eclipse. As I mentioned, it’d been a while…

By: Rick Blair

Rick Blair — Sun, 10 May 2009 17:55:36 +0000

I work in a windows/linux shop and develop java/SQL on a mac. I have used NetBeans, Eclipse, and Intellij. I prefer eclipse first then IntelliJ. I also have MySql, PostGres, Tomcat, Ant and Apache loaded in /usr/local. Pretty much a great development platform. It is real straight forward to download and install packages using the terminal and command line tools. If you are used to *nix with a terminal and a command line, then you will feel right at home. Getting PostGres, and MySql to run at startup is different than on linux, but the process is the same. You edit/create a little script and put it in the correct place. Googling for how to do so will find the solution. Like wise with a custom install of apache or tomcat.

CVS and SVN support are built in as is emacs and vi. Yes people still use them!

I have much fewer problems with my mac than the windows guys and the linux folks are a bit jealous as well!

All in all a great OS development platform!

Cheers!

By: Robert Wenc

Robert Wenc — Sun, 10 May 2009 02:05:40 +0000

I use IntelliJ IDEA on OS X. I’ve used Eclipse/WSAD before and I’ve very impressed with IntelliJ (even if it does cost some $) it’s worth it. Spring support is really good in it. I run it in 64-bit mode, but it has some quirks mostly due to Apple not have a super-stable 64-bit Java6 JVM yet. I’ve been using the latest builds and it’s getting much better compared to the first 8.x releases. For database, I use local MySQL with CocoaMySQL or you can download Oracle SQL Developer (which runs well on OS X) if you got Oracle.

By: Rob Oakes

Rob Oakes — Fri, 08 May 2009 21:07:36 +0000

It appears that the experience can be very different depending on the tools you intend to use. For database work based on MySql and Java, the Mac is an excellent solution. However, the setup can be quite onerous. I recently made the decision to switch from a proprietary solution (Matlab) to an OpenSource one (Python). This was done slowly and after translating most of the base code myself.

The original plan was to purchase Macs and use them for our main development environment. I started by buying myself a 17 inch Macbook Pro and trying to configure it for cross platform work with both Mono and PyQt. This turned out to be a rather substantial nightmare. It turns out that the Mac installation of Python and several of the other base technologies were added as an afterthought.

On K/X/Ubuntu Linux, a full development environment can be configured in just a few minutes by typing “sudo apt-get packagename.” You then patiently wait for the package to be downloaded, configured, and updated automatically. And though a similar solution can be found in MacPorts, I found much of the software to be out of date or buggy. As a result, in many cases I found it necessary to manually download the source code, resolve dependencies and build the software from scratch. I also discovered that the released source often included bugs or errors that had to be manually patched prior to successfully building the binaries. Rather than just a few moments, the setup of my build environment required nearly four months work of weekends and evenings. And things still don’t quite work right.

I have since decided that our primary development environment will be on Dell workstations driven through K/X/Ubuntu. It is more cost efficient, all of the same OpenSouce tools are provided, but other people worry about the setup, configuration and updating.

One other though, while I rather like TextMate for a code editor, it has just enough quirks that I get rather frustrated while using it. (My life would be much happier if the developer could get around to doing a proper implementation of properly indented line wraps or code folding.) I’ve tried nearly all of the other text editors and can’t find one with which I am completely satisfied. In contrast, the e-TextEditor for Windows and Linux gets all the small things right and supports TextMate bundles.

Rather than Mac, I would recommend Linux workstations. Though most Mac users brag about real Unix underpinnings, the truth is that Unix and OpenSource is poorly integrated into the software. In contrast, Linux is much better integrated. Further, you will get much more capable hardware for the same price. The Apple premium is very, very real.

By: Christian

Christian — Fri, 08 May 2009 11:41:45 +0000

Hi,

i switched to Mac (again) on 2006 for a test drive on an 17″ iMac and soon (August 2006) i made a MacBook Pro my primary machine.
I develop for Oracle using, JDeveloper, XCode(!), TextMate, Shell (iTerm mostly), CornerStone (subversion), EClipse, TOAD (in Windows using Parallels 4) and all the windows only Oracle Tools (BI Suite/Forms/Reports and so on).

The platform is highly efficient for me. I can run the shell scripts that are supposed to run on our linux or other unix db and/or app server locally before i deploy them.

Having a real unix with a efficient shell really helps a lot as soon as you realize you have it! After years on the windows platform you almost forget what can be done using shell scripts.

I even use XCode to develop Unix/Linux serverside C Programs on the my Mac and deploy them to linux using gcc compiler finally.

Also the integration of all the programs on the mac (drag a folder on iterm or Terminal.app to get its full path into the shell) increases performance when coding an working step by step.
The only time i have to boot my mac is when system update are immanent, the windows vm is also stable since more than 2 years, mostly because there are no more installs to be done on it, i use only 4-5 Oracle specific programs in it, where there are really no counterparts on the mac.

System management on the mac is kept a the absolute ZERO effort level. I naver have to dig down into the system to make it work as i had to my windows machines.
That alone justifies the buy. Price will not make a difference comparable capable machines for windows haver almost sames prices. Only the 79.95 for either Parallels or VMWare have to be taken into account. The (Windows XP!?) licences from your old dell machines can well be used inside parallels.

My adwise: GO GET MACS.

By: Gerd

Gerd — Fri, 08 May 2009 09:23:00 +0000

- Eclipse 3.4 for Java-development.
- DB Solo for database work.
- VMWare for your local test-environments. I created thin WinXP and Linux clean installs and then reimage whenever necessary.

By: Daniel Kvasnička jr.

Daniel Kvasnička jr. — Fri, 08 May 2009 08:06:18 +0000

#16: What “better than OS X commandline utilities” and “server tools” do you mean — considering Java & SQL development?

By: LPC

LPC — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:06:43 +0000

You might want to think about posting this in a Windows-based forum, as well, just to really get both sides of the argument.

By: MS

MS — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:58:48 +0000

If you don’t really care about the Xcode kind of development for applications, you’d be better off IMHO using an Ubuntu Linux setup + MySQL or Postgres SQL + Java/Eclipse IDE. This gives you better than OS X commandline utilities, server tools, open source software packages and also the security (no Windows, so no bluescreens, no viruses).

There is a reason why LAMP (you can Google that) is considered a highly cost effective and mature stack.

By: Zachary Abresch

Zachary Abresch — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:50:36 +0000

I use Espresso as my main code editor / FTP. Terminal gives you all the command line love you can handle. I recently discovered Sequel Pro which is a great remote SQL client. I’ve been developing on a Mac for over 10 years (converted from a PC geek) and will NEVER go back for ANY REASON!