I have been looking for a good text editor on Windows for some time. I have used JEdit on all platforms for a number of years. However, there are just times, when its really nice to have a native editor. One that is small lightweight and easy to use.

On the Mac, you have TextMate which is a great little editor. Smart, slick, fast and easy to use. But, some of my work at Sun requires Windows, so I can not use the Mac all time.

So I tried a number of the free editors for Windows. They work, but they just are not much of an improvement. Finally, I ran across Ultraedit (http://www.ultraedit.com/). Though not free, like TextMate is is reasonably priced. It meets all the requirements I mentioned, has nice syntax highlighting and seems to be easy to use. So if you are looking for something to edit code with on Windows, check it out.

If you want to play around with PHP LAMP or Ruby on Rails programming, it can be very challenging to get all the pieces required for the evironment installed and working together. So instead of digging into the code, you end up troubleshooting MySQL or PHPMyAdmin.

Thankfully some hard working developers out there have created some one click installers that automatically install all the pieces of a development environment. All the pieces get installed, work together and don't mess up your system.

LAMP

The the LAMP based installer I found was XAMPP. This package installs PHP, MySQL, Apache, Apache, SQLite, PHPMyAdmin, etc... Everything you need to get right to hacking code. They have installers for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris.

Ruby on Rails

For Windows you can install Instant Rails. You get Ruby, Rails, Apache, MySQL and PHPMyadmin in this package.

For Mac OS X you can download locomotive. This package GREATLY simplifies Rails development on OSX. Ruby, Rails, MySQL, SQLite are all included without messing with the rest of your OS X setup.

Well I'm back at Sun again! I've been busy so I haven't had a chance to post. I'm back in education again and am going to be working in the Ajax, Web Services and Java areas. Woo hoo!

Hopefully I'll have a chance to post about some of this stuff in the days and weeks to come.