Battle for one window web development

When it comes to web development on the Mac, there is a very wide selection tools available all the way from a full fledged IDE to simple plain text editors. Lately we have begun to see these ?one window development? suites cropping up. Mac app developer Painc decided to build Coda, an all in one app that combined a web development environment complete with the tools that would normally occupy 4-6 separate applications dedicated to everything from CSS, to previewing your page, syncing with your server, and even providing terminal access all in a single application. As much as I love Coda, sometimes you just need a simple text editor. TextMate is a powerful, multifaceted plain-text editor that will be able to provide syntax highlighting and functionality for web languages like PHP, XHTML, and CSS all the way to C and C++. But with TextMate I still need to have open some type of FTP client to upload new files to my server. Swapping back and forth between TextMate and Transmit gets to be a pain in the ass after a few hours of coding. Mac Developer MacRabbit has answered the call and delivers with its brand-spankin-new application Espresso. Espresso takes the simplicity of TextMate and combines it with the utilities that Coda offers in a very simple, easy to use package.

When you first launch Espresso, you are brought to a blank screen where you can start adding files. Or, you can add a folder and create a new project in an almost identical way that you can in TextMate. From there you can add a server to connect to (FTP, SFTP, or even Amazon S3) for your project and even add a preview page (basically an embedded Safari/WebKit browser window). In terms of file transfers and uploading, Espresso gives you a few options. You of course have your traditional method where you can drag-and-drop files to and from your server, but Espresso has incorporated some cool new features to manage your files including three publishing options; Update, Merge, and Mirror. All three are essentially a mini, simplified version control for publishing your website to your server. As of the release, Espresso only supports the five mainstream web languages: XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP, and Javascript. But for all you people that want to use Espresso for more than just web development, fear not. Espresso has support for third-party languages that they are calling ?sugars?. You can find a list over at the Coffee House. Overall, Espresso is a very nice application and can simplify many things in the web development process. Although Espresso is now my web development app of choice, I find myself bouncing back and forth between Coda and TextMate for things that they can do better than what Espresso offers. Espresso is a solid app rolling in around $80.00 USD (?59.99).