Monday, October 20, 2014

Webstorm supports Open Source projects

Since all of my open source projects are turning to HTML-5/JS based architectures, I started looking into platforms to develop stamp-webservices 4.0 that would be on the NodeJS platform. I am also supporting ng-scrolling-table which is AngularJS based. I had previously used Netbeans 8.0.X for developing ng-scrolling-table, however the lack of NodeJS debugging and support for many of the NodeJS capabilities was forcing me to look elsewhere. I tried Eclipse again, but like usual with Eclipse, it either works great or not at all. For me it was the later. I had been using MS Visual Studio 2013 however I found this platform rather "annoying" (to say the least - lots of odd key sequences, scrolling in the files and slower than I'd like for pure JS tools).

This led me to look at Webstorm. I had always avoided it, because it seems like just one more IDE tool, was a commercial product and I wanted to support Netbeans/Eclipse initiatives. But after one evening of using the trial version I was impressed! Not only was I able to do full HTML-5 debugging in it, I was able to launch my NodeJS server, debug content, it recognized when node was running and asked to restart (when switching between run and debug modes) and was able to executer all of my Mocha integration tests from the IDE with full stack trace link through. I was sold. I also noticed that they offer a program to support Open Source projects (both of these are) and provide a free license key to the projects. Superb, and I may not consider discussing with my manager to obtain a license for work related activities. Nice to see a company supporting the open source community (which all these companies use internally)

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