An integrated development environment is a software application that provides a number of facilities for developers such as a source code editor, debugger and some work automation tools.
CodeLobster is an affordable integrated development environment (IDE) available for Microsoft Windows users. The versions of Windows that CodeLobster supports are : Windows ME, Windows NT 4.x, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2008 Server, Windows Vista and Windows 7.
CodeLobster is available in 3 versions : Free, Lite and Professional.
The Free Version
The free version of CodeLobster offers a wide range of automation tools like :
- PHP, HTML, JavaScript, CSS code highlighting and collapsing
- HTML autocomplete
- Autocomplete of tags, attributes for current tag, closing tags.
- HTML/CSS code inspector which makes it simple to find HTML elements and its styles buried deep in the page.
- HTML toolbar
- CSS autocomplete of style property names and values.
- JavaScript Advanced autocomplete of keywords, DOM elements and their properties.
- PHP Advanced autocomplete. This feature speeds up writing a code. Autocomplete includes wide selection of code completion listings.Lists are formed of both standard PHP and user’s classes, variables, functions, constants and keywords. Starting typing new element, lists of all possible variants for its completion are being displaying after $this-> and ClassName
- PHP Debugger. The Debugger is a package of tools that allows a developer debugging applications during developing process. The debugger includes functions step, watch window, local variables window and call stack windows
- Navigation by holding CTRL key for A, LINK, IMG tags, BACKGROUND attributes and PHP functions
- Class View
- Project management tools
- Browser preview
The Lite version
Among all the features of the free version, the lite version offers 3 additional tools for even more advanced programming :
- HTML, CSS, PHP code validator
- SQL manager
- Support for Version Control Systems: SVN, Git etc.
The Professional version
The professional version of Codelobster offers everything a developer might wish from an integrated development environment, extending the tools offered by the free and lite versions quite a bit.
This version offers full support through plugins to the most used frameworks such as : Drupal CMS, Joomla CMS, Smarty engine, JQuery library, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Symfony, Yii, Facebook and WordPress.
The WordPress plugin offers the ability to install WordPress, offers auto-complete, context and dynamical help as well as a really good theme editor.
The Joomla plugin offers the ability to install Joomla CMS, create modules, auto-complete, context and dynamical help as well as theme editor.
Any of the other plugins offer extended functionality to the software as well as provide valuable helping tools for developers.
For more information check out CodeLobster.
