ReadWriteHack

Are you an iOS developer thinking about dipping your toe into the Android pool? If so, you should read developer Nick Farina's post about his experience developing on Android after developing on iOS.

Farina compares the development environment (he writes that you'll hate Eclipse at first, but once you get used to it "you'll enjoy some seriously amazing, productivity-boosting code completion, refactoring, and automatic fixing."), provides slick side-by-side code comparisons (spoiler: Java and Objective-C look a lot alike) and addresses the fragmentation issue.

Today, HP introduced a series of new software tools to help agile developers manage their development projects. The tools fit into various places in HP's Application Lifecycle Management suite in interesting ways and extend the nature of agile programming to be scaled up to immense levels.

The new products include:

Last year we looked at the best code editors for the iPad. At the time, there weren't many competitors on Android.

That's changed, and there are now at least two that are particularly well suited for programming on the go.

In a blog post Pavel Feldman explains how to use WebKit Web Inspector outside of the target browser. WebKit Inspector can communicate with WebKit-based browsers through the Remote Debugging Protocol, providing a debugging environment very similar to the one found locally.

Some reasons to use Web Inspector this way include debugging mode applications and IDE integration. However, from what I can tell, Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android don't yet support the Remote Debugging Protocol.

Microsoft has released the second beta of its open source Python Tools plugin for Visual Studio. It gives developers the ability code in Python, CPython and IronPython from within Visual Studio. It's available under the Apache 2.0 license.

We've asked you before what your favorite IDE is. And we've covered a few developer-centric text editors for the iPad. But what if you want to develop apps from your browser? There are a few options available, including Ace, Cloud9 IDE (which uses Ace), CodeMirror, Eclipse's Orion and the Chrome app SourceKit (which also uses Ace).

Do you use any of these? Which one is most promising?

RStudio a is free and open source IDE for R programmers. It's available for Linux, OSX and Windows - and you can run it from the Web. It's built with HTML and JavaScript and looks pretty slick. You can find it on Github here.

According to the RStudio blog, the team plans to monetize the product by selling services such as support, training, consulting and hosting.

Last week Oracle announced it will discontinue support for Ruby in NetBeans. RedMonk's Michael Coté doesn't think it's a big deal. "NetBeans was a nice tool, but it wasn't the lynch-pin of success for that community," he writes. "There's a wide array of free and commercial tools out there that developers love using."

Coté thinks that Oracle's withdrawal of support is motivated by a lack of revenue from supporting Ruby. "Arguably, growing the ruby community helps Oracle grow the sales pie for MySQL (which they also now own), but I'm not sure that'd be big enough or a direct enough correlation for the money-minded Oracle decision makers," he writes.

This week Google added a CodeMirror-powered code editor to Google Project Hosting. This enables developers to make quick changes to Google projects from within the browser without having to deal with Mercurial or Subversion.

It previews the changes that you are about to commit and, for contributors without commit privileges, it can file changes as a patch in the project's issue tracker.

Love Vim? Use Gmail? Then check out Vmail, a Ruby-based Gmail client for Vim written by Daniel Choi. Vmail gives you a full command line interface for Gmail from within Vim, including reading, composing, starring, deleting, archiving and marking spam.

Of course, Emacs users have been able to check e-mail from within Emacs for years. "A common criticism that text editor (vim) fans throw in the face of operating system fans (emacs) is that a text editor should simply edit text," writes Steve Klabnik at The Changelog. "I'm slightly torn, but it's still pretty freaking cool." Don't worry Vim purists: it's just a plugin, not a change to the Vim core.