Re: Free Perl IDE for a begginer

[Anonymous Monk]

karpatov, you mention that you want a debugger, but Perl already comes with one, so I'm guessing you want a GUI debugger. That limits your choices somewhat, since many free software users just use the terminal-based one (when necessary -- and lots of devs only very infrequently use a debugger).

You can use Emacs, along with debugger integration, but it will take some effort on your part.

If you want to put in near zero effort, have a nice GUI debugger, and also a slew of other fancy features, you probably want the Komodo IDE. The people who develop Komodo are paid to make your life easier.

Eclipse is also an option, but personally I can't stand it. It's huge, slow, has (IMO) an awful editor component, and isn't as easy to use as it should be.

[systems]

well, I never tried the komodo ide, but I downloaded and checked their new free komodo editor.

if anything its slooooooow, if the komodo ide is anything like it, it will have to be a lot slower than eclipse.

[Anonymous Monk]

Yeah, Komodo (the editor and also the full IDE) and Eclipse are both slow. I haven't done a side-by-side comparison of the two to see which is slower though.

That said, the OP sounds new at this, and probably won't be pushing the limits of rapid text editing, so the speed should be ok for him.

If you want a full-featured IDE for Perl that's easy to use and has a lot of power IDE features (GUI debugger, code browser, regex helper tool, projects, snippets, macros, templates, and so on), then I think Komodo is a good compromise.

I don't want to sound like an advertisement for it though. I'd prefer the OP use completely free software tools. But at least ActiveState has been good for the community in general, and the editor component of Komodo is licensed under some sort of open source license.

[Erez]

the editor component of Komodo is licensed under some sort of open source license.

Not in the least, the license agreement page makes it very clear that the program is closed and proprietary. It even goes to the extent to claim "you may not provide any End User with access to the development or interactive capabilities of the Software libraries or technology, nor may you expose the base programming language(s) as a scripting language within the Works to any such End User.".

I also find the usage of such applications to be redundant and carry a huge overhead. Working with languages such as Java, or C#, that impose the programmer with tons of redundant syntax of their own, such tools are needed to keep track of everything that goes around the code (even inside a class).
For Perl, this is truly an overkill and has the added issue of forcing the IDE way of doing things on the programmer.
A good text editor would suffice, and allow to focus on the actual task, while not limiting in anyway (rather than the interface).

One known advantage of IDEs for other languages is that these usually combine the editor component with a compiler and debugger into a (pseudo-)integrated environment (hence the name), but Perl itself is already such an environment with perl and perldb.
If something fancier is needed, the debugger can be integrated with existing editors, or be called via a GUI (e.g. ptkdb).

UPDATE: I missed the OpenKomodo project which is free-software (or will be, it seems to be in very early development stage).

[hipowls]

Komodo Edit is not open source but there is a version of Komodo, OpenKomodo, that is open source.