CRM Newsletter
 
NEWSLETTERS
 

CIO.com updates, insights and advice on technology, management and your career.

 
 
 
LEADERSHIP
 
CIO Executive Programs
The Leader in Face-to-Face Education for Senior Executives

Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »

 
CIO Executive Council
A Peer-Advisory Service and Professional Association for CIOs

Turn Geeks into Leaders

June 17, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM U.S./ET (GMT-4)

Larry Bonfante, CIO of the U.S. Tennis Association, will discuss the skills and approaches that your rising IT leaders must learn to be effective in an executive capacity.

How to Handle Your New CEO: Managing Turnover at the Top

June 18, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM U.S./Eastern (GMT-4)

Turbulent times have increased turnover at the top. Find out what Council CIOs have done to "break in" new CEOs—build relationships, set expectations, educate on the role of IT.

Mid-Market CIO Panel: Tips and Techniques for Improving Vendor Relationships

July 15, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM U.S./Eastern (GMT-4)

We'll highlight relationship priorities and best practices identified in a Council study, and we'll interact with a CIO panel on the approaches they've used to improve strategic vendor partnerships.

Executive Competencies Assessment Tool

Assess Your Business Leadership Skills with the Council's new benchmarking tool. Rate yourself in change leadership, strategy, customer focus and more.

More / Register »

Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »



 
 
RESOURCE CENTER
 
 
 
SUBSCRIBE TO CIO
 
Are you involved in setting the direction for your company's IT budget or strategy?

Apply today for a FREE subscription to CIO Magazine!

 
 

Developers Rate Satisfaction with Their IDEs

Programmers spend a huge amount of time in the integrated development environment, where they write, debug and optimize their applications. A new Evans Data report identifies the IDEs that make developers say, "Boy, do I love this tool!"

 

May 28, 2008CIO

While developers can still write applications with a command-line compiler and a text editor (emacs versus vi flame war, anyone?), most programmers these days turn to an integrated development environment (IDE). An IDE can present a common user interface to all the tools in the developer's arsenal, from debugger to unit testing tools to source code management system. But with dozens of popular IDEs to choose from, which one is best?

For the third year in a row, Evans Data conducted a worldwide survey of developers' satisfaction with the features of various IDEs. The 2008 free report (registration required) compiles the feedback from over 1,200 developers. The results are based on experience, not hearsay; only users of an IDE were asked to rank the features of each IDE.

The goal, says the report, was to shed light on the different toolsets and characteristics of each IDE and to show the strengths and weaknesses of each. "The design philosophy behind integrated toolsets can differ significantly as vendors target different market segments and provide different capabilities focused on the needs of those segments," its author writes. But whether an IDE is an open-source tool or designed for enterprise use (or both!), it ought to fulfill and ideally exceed user expectations.

The IDE that most clearly achieved that goal is IBM's Rational Application Developer, which got the best scores from their users for the second time in three years. Its rankings were head and shoulders above competitor tools in user satisfaction. The next three IDEs in developer ranking are JDeveloper, Microsoft's Visual Studio, and Sun Studio. Other IDEs evaluated include Adobe Creative Suite / Macromedia Studio, Codegear's Delphi, MyEclipse and NetBeans. MyEclipse and NetBeans were at the bottom of the heap overall, though individual features had high satisfaction rankings.

The report also looked at the product attributes and features that matter most to developers. The IDE attributes ranked as most important are debuggers, ease of use and the performance of the resulting applications. None of these is surprising; every developer depends on a debugger to help identify and solve software defects, and an IDE that gets in the way won't last long on a development desktop (at least not if the developer has anything to say about it). Plus, since the point of all the programming is to create production applications, the code really ought to run fast.

The least critical IDE capabilities—relatively speaking—are the IDE's code profiler, sample applications, and the availability of third-party tools. The availability of third-party tools has decreased in value rather significantly, says the report, perhaps because buying complete "out of the box" solutions has become more popular during the last year.

Fifteen IDE features and capabilities were rated by the users, including quality of tech support, the size and quality of the developer community, and documentation. Each of the eight IDEs spotlighted are examined on those product feature satisfaction rankings. Delphi, for example, gets extremely high marks for ease of use, but very low ones for sample applications.

Other stories by Esther Schindler © 2008 CXO Media Inc.
 
 
Loading...
 
WHITE PAPERS

Brocade and Imperva: Providing Best-of-Breed Products

Web applications have become the backbone of business in nearly every segment of the economy.
 

How is Open Source Changing the Face of Enterprise Software?

Ensure success with your Operational Performance Management initiative.
 

Improve Code Quality Across Your Software Organization

Address developer skills and software processes, and you will eliminate many software quality issues.
 

Cost Effective Data Loss Prevention

Learn how Data Loss Prevention technologies can in fact be deployed in a cost effective manner.
 

Data Loss Prevention and Enterprise Rights Management

Enterprise Management Associates highlights the complementary values of Data Loss Prevention and Enterprise Rights Management as a strategic approach to information risk control.
 

Investing in Business Analytics Technology

Find the answers to your questions about business anyalytics initiatives.
 

WEBCASTS

IT Consolidation Made Easy

The Primary IT Initiative for Reducing Costs
 

Webcast with Dan Vesset: Investing in Business Analytics Technology

What exactly is business analytics and why should you care? Dan Vesset of IDC and Gaurav Verma of SAS answer this a...
 

Capitalize on Your SAP Content

After 18 years of partnership and over 3,000 successful customer deployments, Open Text has become SAP's premier pa...
 

Enterprise Cloud Computing: Ready for Primetime?

The progression toward enterprise cloud computing is happening today, as industry leaders deploy technologies that ...
 

Preparing Your Business Services for the Future

Would you trust your network monitoring tools enough to know when something is truly halting a business service? Wh...
 

Enterprise System Management Challenges in Big Organizations with Eli Almog

In this Podcast with Eli Almog, Corporate Architect in BMC's CTO Office, discusses how IT managers can know when it...
 

Resource Alerts

Get instant email notifications by topic when white papers, webcasts, and case studies are added to our library.

 
FEATURED SPONSORS
 
 
 
SPONSORED LINKS
 

How Open Source is Changing the Face of Enterprise Software

The Link Between Effective Online Business Banking and Web 2.0

Introducing the new HP ProLiant G6 server family

Accenture: Outsourcing for Competitive Advantage. More...

Better spam protection with Postini for just $1/user/mo

Introducing the new HP ProLiant G6 server family

infoBOOM! - The Mid-Sized Company CIO's Exclusive Community

Accenture IT Consulting: Logical meets technological. More . . .

The Fraudster Economy Model: Operating a Business in the Underground

Trade in your old laser printer and get up to $1000 back!

Taking the Service Desk to the Next Level

Revolutionizing Enterprise Application Deployment

Why Data Loss is Increasing--and What You Can Do About It

Data Loss Prevention: A Better Way to Approach Security

Learn how to managing client systems in the enterprise.

Build a High-Performance Open Web Platform

Mid-Sized Company CIO Community: infoBOOM!

Enterprise PBX Comparison Guide

Getting Value from Outdated Networking Equipment

Losing Ground: 2009 TMT Global Security Survey

Stop Application Fraud at the Source with Device Reputation

Learn about the VMware vSphere (TM) & Intel (R) Xeon (R) Processor 5500 Series

Learn how a virtualized enterprise can help your company reduce costs

Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More?

Learn how to save 30% through project & portfolio management.

Software Executives: Take Control of Your Organization's Code Quality

Forrester: Implementing Rich Internet Applications

Accenture IT Consulting: Enabling high performance. More...

Top Five CIO Challenges

Insight makes it easy to spend your Microsoft subsidy check.

Five minute business analytics assessment. Immediate results.

Dangerous Collaboration Practices: 5 Ways IT Can Minimize Risk

Accenture: Outsourcing for uncertain times. Click to learn more.

The Case for Investing in Business Analytics Technology. Read white paper.

Live Webinar: Applying Business Analytics. Click here to learn more

Seven Ways ITIL Can Help You in an Economic Downturn

Developing A Dynamic, Real-Time IT Infrastructure

Maximizing the Business Value of the PC Infrastructure

Communications and Collaboration Needs at Business Organizations

Using Open Source to Deploy Web Applications

Cloud Computing: Read about VMware's compelling vision & set of products

Enterprise PBX Buyer's Guide

Secondary Market Primer: Your Network at Half Price

How Interactive Viewer Reduces the Effort to Meet Visualization Requirements

Top-line Performance that's Bottom-line Efficient

White Paper: 8 Key Ingredients to Building an Internal Cloud

Read about virtualization and consolidation effort best practices

Building the Virtualized Enterprise with VMware Infrastructure

The Global Marketplace Today: Strategies for Tough Times

Top 10 Business and IT Drivers for the Wealth Management Sector