What is an IDE?
An IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, is a program that allows to developers and programmers to consolidate the different aspects of writing a computer program. Some examples of IDE are Visual Studio Code, Codelobster, or PHPStorm.
IDEs increase programmers and developers productivity. There are multiple options out there, and it is very important to choose the one that helps you to be more efficient and to write clean and testable code.
Typically, an IDE consists of a source code editor, automatic construction tools, and a debugger. Most IDEs have smart code auto-completion. Some IDEs contain compilers, or interpreters, or both; others do not, and some of them focus on an special language or framework.
In this post below I explained how to configure PhpStorm with Magento 2:
Codelobster IDE
In this post, I am reviewing a different IDE, the Codelobster IDE. The version of the program I’ve used for this article is the version 1.9.0, released on the 6th of July, 2020.
As any IDE, it allows you to edit code, with syntax highlighting and gives you hints for tags, methods, parameters etc. It also includes auto-completion and allows you to check up-to-date official documentation directly from official sources.
Apart from that, Codelobster has a powerful feature out-of-the-box, it gives you the opportunity to work with files and projects directly on a remote server with a built-in FTP client. This way you can edit, create and delete files directly on your hosting or server, with all of the features that Codelobster provide you locally.
Specificly to PHP, Codelobster comes with a PHP debugger. A debugger allows to execute PHP scripts incrementally, watching the values of all variables in every line.
And finally, it includes (along with many other features) a SQL manager . A SQL Manager allows us to perform any required action with a database – to add, delete, edit a structure and records in tables, to export data, execute SQL queries. Highlighting and autocompletion works for SQL files also.
Multi-platform and cross-platform
In my opinion, the differential factor between Codelobster and other IDEs are that Codelobster contains features to work with multiple platforms and languages with the same program.
More and more, developers work with different technologies and platforms at same time. It is very common for example to work on a Symfony project and a VueJS project at the same time, or to develop a Magento 2 using a WordPress site as CMS, etc.
In the images below, you can see Codelobster in action working with WordPress and VueJS code at same time:
Here is the list of the fully-supported frameworks:
- JavaScript: VueJS, jQuery, Node.js, AngularJS, BackboneJS and MeteorJS.
- PHP: CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Laravel, Phalcon, Smarty, Symfony, Twig and Yii.
- CMS: Magento, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.
- Other: NodeJS, Bootstrap
And finally, if you are a web developer, sure you work with Frontend technologies (CSS, HTML, JavaScript…), Codelobster gives you a preview and live preview buttons to check your instantaneously.
Performance
In terms of performance, Codelobster IDE works well and does not hang working with MacOS. It parses large projects at the same rate as other popular IDEs like Visual Studio Code or PHPStorm.
Related to RAM memory consumption, the consumption is higher that VSC and lower to PHPStorm, but have in mind that VSC contains less features by default.