Looking for a nice IDE for Ajax development?

Blogger: Richard Monson-Haefel

One of the problems with Ajax, from an enterprise perspective, is the dearth of decent IDEs that developers can use. There are probably close to 200 Ajax frameworks now, most of which have little or no following or are dead, but very few Ajax frameworks come with a decent IDE – they are mostly APIs and command line tools.

Backbase has been offering a very nice development environment for Ajax for a while now – even before the Ajax term was coined – so I was happy to see them offer a free version of the commercial product with unlimited seats on a 2-CPU license. They have also launched a community web site, Backbase Developer Network, that looks promising.

There are other good Ajax IDEs out there besides Backbase. I like Nexaweb’s offering in this space as well and JackBe’s. Of course Microsoft is integrating Ajax development plug-in to Visual Studio. Here is a list of IDEs from AjaxPatterns.org (a good resource).