Practical Development Environments

Chapter 3. Project Concepts

This chapter describes ideas that are part of a development environment but are not specific to any particular kind of tool. Examples of such ideas are the following:

• Preconstructed environments, where all the tools for a development environment are provided “out of the box” for you

• Integration of tools to make them work better together

• Automation of the different parts of software creation

• Naming schemes

• Internationalization of products and tools for use in other countries

Preconstructed Development Environments

Preconstructed development environments (PDEs) are what I have chosen to call software development environments that are provided as a single set of software applications. (Whether or not they are practical development environments, as in the title of this book, is a separate issue for each PDE.) Another name sometimes used for them is collaborative development environments, but it seems to me that development environments are always collaborative, and what sets these environments apart is that they come ready-made, prefabricated—in short, preconstructed.

Tip

If you are setting up a development environment and one of these environments works for you, maybe you won’t have to choose every tool to use in your environment. Still, the other chapters in this book contain much more than just which tool to choose, so read on.

One well-known example of a PDE is SourceForge (http://www.sourceforge.net), which uses the term “software development website” to describe ...