Solid Metrowerks IDE reduces dev costs

When it comes to IDEs (integrated development environments), programmers can be a picky lot: Some of them border on outright zealotry. And although business managers would love to give every developer the tools he or she desires, the cost of providing an array of IDEs often gets in the way.

You can probably reduce these costs by choosing Linux as your development platform. Indeed, this economical open-source OS offers a host of tools flexible enough to satisfy even the pickiest of developers. And aside from bottom line considerations, Linux is an excellent and speedy OS on which to develop top-notch open-source and corporate applications alike.

If you do choose Linux as your development platform, run — don’t walk — to purchase Metrowerks’ CodeWarrior for Linux 6.0, Professional Edition. This low cost IDE compares favorably to other IDEs available for Linux, including Sun’s Forte for Java and Borland’s JBuilder. And unlike its rivals, CodeWarrior supports both Java and C++ in a single product, earning it our top score of Excellent.

Because the product is so easy to use, and because Metrowerks provides solid online courses for new and experienced developers, your company will suffer little if any training cost or transitional downtime pain.

Many developers complain that IDEs are often weighed down with tools they will never use. As a result, programmers are often forced to invest additional time learning both the development language and the IDE.

It is refreshing that CodeWarrior contains the right mix of intuitive support features, such as coding syntax support, debugging assistance, and solid compilation support. Developers don’t have to learn a host of pesky, time-consuming, and often useless tools.

Setting up CodeWarrior for Linux is also a snap. In fact, we were able to work with some existing Java code we had on hand and, because CodeWarrior seemed to like our code just fine, we were running in no time.

If you plan to invoke external tools from within the IDE, CodeWarrior now provides support that lets you pass parameters to the external tool. Because we decided to leverage a third-party debugger during our development, this support proved especially handy.

If your business application strategy includes leveraging Java and C++, CodeWarrior for Linux will keep your developers unharried and productive, giving your company a leg up in the market.