Popular IDEs and their disadvantages
There are no ideal products, for your guidance.
The most important element in the application development process is picking the right IDE, which depends not only the platform but on the professional level as well. Let’s get acquainted with the most popular IDEs, discussing both the advantages, disadvantages and the developers’ reviews.
Let’s begin with the mobile market leaders: Windows, Google, and Apple.
Visual Studio 2015
Description: it is one of the oldest programming products for creating both console and graphics interface applications. Addition of the third-party plugins allows you to extremely extend the environment functionality, even to the cross-platform state.
Disadvantages: beginners will have difficulties in mastering Visual Studio personally without any special courses and literature. This product will most likely fit experienced developers who pay attention to the editor’s quality and the testing features.
Android Studio
Description: relatively young and rapidly developing IDE, oriented on Android developers.
Drawbacks: low personalisation opportunities are seen in the code editor and settings. It seems to be a trickle, but still.
XCode
Description: it is an IDE oriented on creating OS X and iOS applications. It seems to be the best option for using such programming languages as Objective C and Swift. Moreover, it is even the only solution for solving particular tasks.
Disadvantages: many developers report on the IDE stability, forcing to make additional changes to their projects after the next version. Additionally, Xcode is a relatively complex IDE for beginners to learn.
From official market leaders, let’s move on to universal cross-platform IDEs:
Xamrin Studio
Description: a popular application development tool for Windows, Phone, Android and iOS, using essentially only C#. In addition to Xamarin Studio, you can also use the plugin for Visual Studio.
Disadvantages: minor, but nonetheless consistent errors, both directly in the IDE and in the output code. Also, despite the reputation of a cross-platform environment, porting ready-made applications to Xamarin is rather difficult.
IntelliJ IDEA
Description: an Integrated Development Environment developed by JetBrains that allows you to develop applications using a variety of popular languages, including Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Groovy, Scala, PHP, C, C++.
Disadvantages: low performance. You will definitely face a painful waiting for compilation, recompilation, testing. Quite often, it is really really annoying.
Appcelerator Titanium
Description: it is a platform for fast creation of console and graphics applications for any devices.
Drawbacks: those opportunities provided by Appcelerator Titanium have the backside: in-code generated errors, , предоставляемые Appcelerator Titanium имеют и обратную сторону: генерируемые ошибки в коде, artificial restrictions, not enough quality documentation.
Eclipse
Description: it is an IDE that was initially Java-oriented, gain popularity for the vast variety of external modules that extremely extend its functionality (including the number of supported languages).
Drawbacks: an essential lack of documentation and no single community of developers.
Netbeans
Description: it is a powerful IDE for developing applications on Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, C, C++ and even Ada.
Drawbacks: low operation speed due to the all-in-one concept. Some plugins (including for developing applications for Android) have significant functional limitations.
PhoneGap
Description: an unusual integrated development environment for developing cross-platform applications. It does not require knowledge of native programming languages. It means that in order to create an Android application, you will not need the Java knowledge. Here JavaScript and HTML5+CSS3 are used.
Drawbacks: limited functionality provoked by the main idea of the off-target development environment.
What Integrated Development Environments do you use? What advantages and disadvantages they have?