February 13, 2005

Good software

Well, thought I'd list some recommendations on software I used myself to write VA2.
editplus2 - the best editor I know of. I can hardly write code or look at log files without it.
Activestate, Perl Dev Kit -. Being able to write services in Perl and distribute executables that don't require environments (like Java or C#) gave me a C++ style executables with the efficency of interpreted languages. Siebel recently released a cool tool, called EVT, or Environment Verification Tool. I noticed it was written in Perl and compiled for free with Perl2exe from IndigoStar. I was happy to pay for the Activestate version instead of the free one. My bet is we see more commercial software distributed with compiled Perl. The efficiency factor of being able to use open source modules is incredible. The Perl community eclipses any other for the amount of useable code out there.
Killer graphs - especially time dependent graphs.
ERD software on the cheap. Original version is great, never upgraded. Although they didn't have DB2 support for that version. I designed the schema and can output build scripts for Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, and ANSI.
Installer/GD - good installer. I was surprised what things like InstallShield cost. This did the job for a much lower price.
Visual CHM - for compiled windows documentation. Although I really moved all my docs to HTML on the web. So I'm glad I didn't invest much more.

So, this all adds up to a pretty low investment (not counting the millions of programming hours!) for creating VA2.

Posted by choppen5 at 06:06 PM