Sydney FX started with web design back in 2004 but these days I spend more time studying new web technologies like ruby on rails, flex and the new AIR from Adobe and sometimes you need costly editors to assist you in speeding up your development time.

Well now there is an IDE that is multi platform so no matter if your working on Windows, Apple, or Linux, there is a release just for you.

Now I haven’t been using Aptana for very long but I have now installed it on both my Windows and Linux platforms mainly for Rails development because there are very few good editors that meet the needs of rails programmers straight out of the box. Most mac users including myself use the Textmate however Aptana is great if you can’t spare the money for a mac or need an alternative editor when you don’t have a mac handy or don’t want a mac altogether.

I’ve seen a number of custom setups for text editors on linux which look great however you’ll need to know how to get the editor to suit your needs. If you don’t have that knowledge then check out Aptana. It’s really cool, and can be used for all the latest web technology programming like Ajax, HTML, AIR, and even iPhone.

Aptana is an open source project founded by Paul Colton who has been involved in a number of successful technologies in previous ventures. Check out more of Aptana at the official website.

But what about when you are developing on Microsoft’s Windows platform. Well after playing around with a few editors I found Notepad++ which has some remarkable similarity’s to Textmate for Apple.

The best part about Notepad++ is it’s free and it’s also open source, however you can give donations as it started and developed by Don Ho and a small group of developers. I didn’t spend a lot of time using Notepad++ mainly because I spend most of my time on a Mac however I did enjoy using it as a Ruby on Rails editor for Windows. The only thing I didn’t see was a project window which you could import your Rails project framework into for easy access.

Notepad++ has full code highlighting, use defined language including Ruby, zoom in and out, and alot more.

A great editor and well worth further investigation.

While I ventured into my Ruby on Rails experience, I found this great text editor called Textmate that is recommended by the Rails team for Mac users. Unfortunately there isn’t a version for Windows so you’ll have to convert to Mac if you want it.

Personally I’ve never really been a big fan of text editors for any serious work and this has mainly been because they have never had much functionality up until now. Textmate is a very cool editor having the ability to provide code structure, highlighting, code block collapsing and so much more.

You can code HTML, Applescript, Javascript, Ruby, XML and more. This is one texteditor that is full of surprises with plenty of options for even the most hardcore coding junkie.

Once you start using it you’ll find it very addictive thinking hey, I can use Textmate to code this, and I can use textmate to code that. So crunch time… how much is it? Well it only costs around AUS$70 which isn’t alot for such an extensive and well designed texteditor that is more than capable of handling all your coding duties and more. If your not sure you’ll like it, you can download the trial version for a limited time before you decide to hand over any cash.

Find out more about Textmate from www.macromates.com.

After contemplating modifying my Mac to run Ruby on Rails I decided against any system modifications. The main reason is any documentation on the web regarding installing Rails on the Mac was a little too out dated for my liking and very little support.

So what was I to do? Well I decided that using Locomotive from http://locomotive.raaum.org/ was going to be the safest and easiest option and I wasn’t wrong. Installing Locomotive was super easy and all I needed to do was download it, mount the dmg file and drag the Locomotive Icon into my Applications folder and Bingo! Ruby on Rails is ready to go.

The only thing to keep in mind is that you need to make sure you use the open up any terminals from within the Locomotive interface which is again pretty easy to remember. Locomotive at the time of this post uses the lighttpd web server by default when starting the web server using the command ruby script/server. If you prefer you can use the Webrick webserver with Locomotive by forcing it ruby script/server webrick. Supposedly Webrick is better but I’m no expert so I’m just using Webrick for any development.

The only other thing to keep in mind with Locomotive is that if you want to do more robust database work you’ll need to have MySQL installed on the Mac as the databases shipped with Locomotive aren’t really for a production environment.

After a quick think about how I was going to do this I put together some code that would remove the spaces.

$mobile = ” 0400 000 000″;
//echo $mobile;
$mobile = trim($mobile);
$numcount = strlen($mobile);
//echo $numcount;
$ptr=0;

while ($i <= $numcount) { //Loop until testing of all numerals in ph no
if ($mobile{$ptr} != ” “) {
$ptr++;
}else{
$mobiletemp = substr($mobile, 0, $ptr);
echo “mobiletemp:”.$mobiletemp.”\n”;
$mobile = $mobiletemp.substr($mobile,($ptr+1),$numcount);
echo “mobile :”.$mobile;
$ptr++;
};
$i++;
}

So here I was really proud of myself for cooking up such an elaborate chunk of code that would do what I needed. During the process of writing the code I posted a question on a developer forum asking for a quick way of removing the spaces. By the time I finished my piece of code I had a response from the developer forum.

And here was their solution

$mobile = str_replace ( ‘ ‘, ”, $mobile );

That’s right. Just one line of code to do the same thing as my 18 lines of code. Same solution different method.
Hopefully someone who like me needs to know how to do this in a hurry and will find this post.