Development Environments

I’ve been following the portable apps movement for a couple of years and it has been great – specially the open-source, OSI certification scene.

One can presently choose to assemble its preferred work environment, carefully tuned to his/her heart’s content, including a (fairly diverse) office, internet, multimedia and security implements galore, plenty of unproductivity apps (seems they are called "games") and all manner of tools to put Batman’s belt to shame. And then one can carry it around in a memory stick ... err, or maybe a full DVD...

But something very much missed and hopped for are integrated development means for the most common languages

– even if said means are not the most sophisticated (a basic IDE, a decent compiler and a fair debugger, basically); should those means be compatible with readily available components, so much the better.

Many a lowly coder masher/project sputter in middle-income places wander from site to site, putting together DLLs, front-ends, add-ons and all sorts of kludges in couple-of-weeks dashes as roaming contractors.

Practicality dictates there are not a lot of time to install a minimum of tools (and customize them) at the client’s place/pool of PCs. And most "portable" PCs fit to development (resources to build any boat include a fully installed shipyard) are heavily "luggable" and perilously conspicuous in any third world street. One can already carry all his documentation on a DVD or a small HD; why not the whole development environment?!

A common example for you to visualize: I live in Portugal, which is a peaceful and secure enough place to be, but I often go to work in small term contracts into places like Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and the like. Similar situations occur for thousands and thousands of Spaniard or French guys, whose languages avails them access to markets, not as big but still comparable to, the English speaking world.

Now I notice with more than a bit of anticipation the test phases for environments like Code::Blocks (with GCC or MinGW) and Lazarus (with Free Pascal, RTL) as Portable Apps.

I WANT TO CHEER THEM UP!

Because one can’t request what is already under way...

Those projects, perhaps more than any other, will contribute to divulge, amidst the global development community, the portable apps movement.

PS.: I also suspect many a budding coder could also use a "discreet" portable programming environment to better himself/herself, at the office PC, half an hour at a time...