Well back in the big city now, art house again (i quite like it) but lots of meaty PHP. Nice.

Comet is a pro­gram­ming tech­nique that enables web servers to send data to the client with­out hav­ing any need for the client to request it. This tech­nique will pro­duce more respon­sive appli­ca­tions than clas­sic AJAX. In clas­sic AJAX appli­ca­tions, web browser (client) can­not be noti­fied in real time that the server data model has changed. The user must cre­ate a request (for exam­ple by click­ing on a link) or a peri­odic AJAX request must hap­pen in order to get new data from the server.

Well it hadn’t really occurred to me that a pro­fes­sional pro­gram­mer would have any prob­lems using dif­fer­ent IDE’s. Whether it Notepad, or Vi or Emacs etc. surely a pro is going to famil­iarise them­selves with a range and the con­cepts so they are flex­i­ble in their work prac­tices and out­look? In my time i have used the above as well as Home­site, Dreamweaver, Zend Stu­dio, Mac Xcode tools and Inter­face designer, Eclipse, TECO, BRIEF, MS Visual Stu­dion, Blue­fish, Aptana Kde­velop and prob­a­bly some i have for­got­ten about.

Ok some of them are edi­tors rather than IDE’s but you can use them in much the same way and for edi­tors like Vi and Emacs there are a wealth of plug-ins thea give them much more functionality.

How­ever of course i for­got the nature of MS pro­gram­mers and per­haps the MS phi­los­o­phy in which the IDE does all the work, hides all the com­plex­ity and actu­ally does most of the pro­gram­ming (badly) for you. There fore the level of knowl­edge required is less, the learn­ing curve less and the qual­ity of the end result is also less.

Any way to make the tran­si­tion here is an arti­cle on the IBM devel­op­er­works site to help any Microserfs mak­ing the transtion