confused with the IDE concept

this question, though has nothing to do with the programming stuff, gets me bugged while I try to delve deeper a bit. I am confused with what th开发者_运维技巧is IDE means. somewhere it says its an editor or somewhere like its some PHP editor. I use dreamweaver normally and notepad ++ occasionally .. Is this what IDE is ? or is that I have misunderstood things.??

An integrated development environment is generally a whole bunch of tools integrated into one.

This includes editor, compiler, debugger and whatever other tools you may want to add.

Back in pre-history, we used to use an editor to edit the files, then we would exit and use a compiler, then a linker to produce the final product (actually, when I first started, we used punch cards and 80x25 data entry sheets and handed them to data entry operators for input into the computer, but I don't want to bore the youngsters among you).

Nowadays we just press the F5 key or, if you use Emacs,

     CTRLALTMETAOPEN-APPLEATTNLEFT-SHIFTRIGHT_SHIFTB

while holding our heads inclined at an angle of 22.5^o to the Earth's magnetic field and biting the head off a chicken :-)

Some IDEs (such as Eclipse) provide a plug-in environment where people can create plug-ins to add many tools to the standard ones. Think in terms of:

• source code control and versioning.
• support for multiple (computer) languages.
• refactoring tools.
• direct publishing of applications to environments (such as EAR files to an application server).
• extraction of strings for internationalisation

and so on, ad near infinitum.

Think; everything you need to write, build, run, and debug your application in one program.