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

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!

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 And though a similar solution can be found in MacPorts, I found much of the software to be out of date or buggy.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.

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.

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

This hooks up to Assembla.com for Trac, subversion, wiki, scrum logs, tickets etc. absolutely brilliant service for a low price, we could not get close to hosting our own code server without paying at least 10 times the Assembla rates.

My favorite part of this setup is that I never have to leave Eclipse, everything is integrated, not even a browser or a subversion client is running when Im coding.

Come to think of it, I could be on a PC 80% of the time and not notice it(disregarding the design jokes and win pop ups) that is a perfect setup in my book:)

Some C# code and data base maintenance/tier programming is done on Windows boxes because there isn’t much to rival Visual Studio there..

The right tool for the job.

Like Dan says – if you’re deploying to Linux then I’d insist on using Linux or a Mac as your development machine. You want your development environment to reflect the production/staging environment as closely as possible. Also, if you spend your whole day in a unix shell, when it comes time to figure out what is wrong with the server you won’t be juggling windows and unix commands in your mind when trying to figure out what’s wrong.

As much as love my Mac for stuff in general, if I was deploying to a Windows server and working in a Windows environment then I’d want to just work with a Windows machine.

I spend all day coding on a Mac in Ruby on Rails and deploying to Linux servers. I have to do a bunch of CSS on a regular basis and Textmate is really awesome for a lightweight developer’s text editor. At my previous job I used a Windows machine to write desktop applications for other Windows machines and I spent all day in Visual Studio building .Net applications. Gotta use what works.

I find Netbeans very elegant and intuitive. It has been pushed by Sun as the ‘up to date, JSR compliant with the latest features’ IDE… as a way to push the community (IBM/Eclipse) by way of competition towards adopting new Java features. With regards to marketshare Eclipse is bigger, and Netbeans has grown. IntelliJ IDEA (commercial paid licence) has a loyal following (small marketshare) who literally swear by it.

With regards to update speed and implementing new Java features I would say that Netbeans comes on top, closely followed by IntelliJ IDEA.

Netbeans 6.7 coming out in less than a month will have a native look-and-feel, and rumours state that Eclipse is following suit.

Pros on using macs: tight control on the platform, easier to have a standardized platform used by all developers.

Cons on using macs: java updates come through quite slowly (although you can use soylatte’s open source jvm instead) and some options are not available (afaik only the Sun CDC CLDC emulators for Java ME).

For MySQL development I have used MAMP as a localised installation (a one click apache/mamp/runs out of the box installation) on my laptop before deploying remotely, and I haven’t come across any issues.

I use bootcamp regularly to switch to windows/vista for some Java ME development. Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?) I tend to be more productive when I do so as my Windows installation is quite spartan – It is hard work to be distracted there – I use my home computer so in your case your mileage may vary.

Overall I tend to switch regularly between mac os x and windows and I find both useful. The most irritating thing in Windows I have come across is the automated updating/rebooting (which drove me absolutely bonkers) but now I do all my updates manually. I am not ‘religious’ about the O.S. I use.

I personally prefer “lighter” environments like Espresso or Textmate for development over the likes of Aptana, Eclipse, Zend for Eclipse or Netbeans.

MAMP Pro is also a decent purchase IMHO, the administrative control panel is fantastic.

I switched to Mac from Linux and I have to say, that for LAMP development, Linux has served me better. The whole package ecosystem of Ubuntu has proven to be a big advantage against MAMP in cases I needed to customize my environment. Well, maybe it was bad to use MAMP and not turn to MacPorts or Fink. Maybe it was just that.

But for Java — which is my primary platform — Mac OS X is a superior dev system. 1.6 is available for Mac either as an official build or as SoyLatte, which is more than usable for headless (= no Swing etc.) development and I have no problems fueling my development Tomcat instance with it and then deploying the app to linux servers. I’m an Eclipse guy, but if you like NetBeans better, so be it :) but hey, Eclipse guys has recently started rewriting it in Cocoa :)

All the JVM versions are neatly set up and structured in OS X — as usual with framework versions — and that’s good. You have a whole bunch of GUI tools for Java installed in OS X. Latest Java updates are not always coming in time… but when you deploy a mission critical app, you don’t swap its JVM’s versions with every update, do you…

As for databases, I thik that available SQL tools for the Mac speak for themselves. There are some luxurious jewels among them.. although I’m perfectly satisfied with the free official MySQL tools.

So with Java, I haven’t lost a bit of productivity in compare with Linux — I gained. Because of all the nurturing and joy of usage OS X gives me so that I can focus on my work.

Not a Java guy myself, but word on the street is that IDEA rocks for that, so +1 on giving it a shot.

Good luck!