Setting up a professional dev env for Ethereum. Part II — Top 6 IDEs for solidity development.

Setting up a professional dev env for Ethereum. Part II — Top 6 IDEs for solidity development.

Choose your IDE (integrated development environment).

You can search online on how to publish a smart contract in 1 hour, heck why that long, you can even find an article to develop Etherum Smart Contract in 10 minutes.

However, let’s be realistic here, these make nice titles for a blog post and it’s a nice gimmick. However, in case you are developing more than just vanilla flavor Smart contract. You cannot escape it and you would need to set up a real development environment.

In this set of 8 articles. We will be covering how to set a working professional development environment. We broke up the process to this 8 part articles;

Part I — Ganache
Part II —Top IDEs for solidity development
Part III — Truffle Suite
Part IV — Remix
Part V — Geth
Part VI — Mist
Part VII — MetaMask
Part VIII — Mainnet

If you didn’t start from Part I, I encourage you to start there.

There are many IDEs (integrated development environments) to choose from. I am not going to get into a showdown of what’s better. Here is a quick list of some top-notch IDEs that can get the job done;

1. Sublime or Atom

An IDE is more than a simple text editor. While code-centric text editors such as Sublime or Atom offer many convenient features such as syntax highlighting, customizable interfaces, and extensive navigation tools, they only allow you to write code. To make functioning applications, you at least need a compiler and a debugger. Sublime has a plugin that can be used with files that have the “solidity” syntax. https://sublimelinter.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

2. Microsoft Visual Studio

Microsoft Visual Studio is top-notch and provides professional debugging and profiling features, as well as tools for compatibility testing so that you can see how your code running on more than 300 devices and browsers. However, the price tag is high and ranging in price from $699 — $2,900 depending on the edition and licensing. You can download and use Visual Studio Code for free and it may be good enough for you. MS VS offers Solidity support that aims to enable all of the Visual Studio Code’s features. Solidity is the language used in Ethereum to create smart contracts. This extension provides:

• Fast linting with solium and solc
• Snippets
• Support for using a workspace-local version of solc
• Support for using a workspace-local version of solium
• Syntax highlighting

Note that if you are a Visual Studio fan, there is also a Solidity extension for Visual Studio; see https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ConsenSys.Solidity. At the time of writing, the plugin works only for Visual Studio 2015 or earlier.

3. IntelliJ IDEA — WebStorm

WebStorm is professional and used in many fortune 500 companies, however, it cost. You can try for a free 30-day evaluation. The parent company IntelliJ IDEA has a version of the software to all the major programming languages out there and it includes a Solidity plugin.

4. Netbeans

Netbeans is a free and open-source IDE. I used it in the past and was very happy with the IDEA, it’s built for editing existing projects or starting from scratch. I am not aware of Solidity plugin at the time of writing, maybe someone can share if they are aware.

5. Eclipse

Eclipse is a free and flexible open-source editor useful for beginners and pros alike. It has a plugin for Solidity;

It’s called YAKINDU-Solidity Tools provides an integrated development environment for Ethereum / solidity based smart contracts.

It features all goodies you can expect from a professional IDE including:

• code completion
• quick fixes
• templates
• live validation
• outline
• code navigation
• semantic highlighting
• solidity compiler integration

6. Aptana Studio 3

Powerful of the open-source IDEs, Aptana Studio 3 is a massive improvement over its predecessors. Since Aptana Studio 3 supports most browser specs, compatibility challenges are minimal, so users can quickly develop, test and deploy web apps from this single IDE. I am not aware of Solidity plugin at the time of writing, maybe someone can share if they are aware.

I am not going to tell you what to use, it depends on your team, the license you have or getting from your workplace and many other factors, the point is to select an IDE to work with. Keep in mind, use your favorite IDE, text editor, or even vim to write your code; there’s no need to buy an IDE.

I will be utilizing WebStorm as your IDE to develop the project. WebStorm is a subset of IntelliJ IDEA and has a plugin for the Solidity language, which provides an easy way to write your contracts.

Also, it provides highlights and code completion to make development easier. You can use the WebStorm and add the Solidity plugin. To do so, first download the plugin here: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9475-intellij-solidity. To get the plugin installed, follow these steps:

1. Select WebStorm ➤ Preferences (or press command + ,).
2. Select Plugins.
3. Search in “Plugins” for “Solidity”. It will say “No Plugins founds.” With a link to “Search in repositories”. Click the “Search in repositories” link. “Intellij-Solidity” plugin will show. See Figure 1.
4. Install both “Intellij-Solidity” plugins: LANGUAGES
   and INSPECTION. See Figure 1.
5. Click IntelliJ-Solidity ➤ install. See Figure 1.
6. Under Plugins search for Solidity Solhint. It will say “No Plugins founds.” With a link to “Search in repositories”. Click the “Search in repositories” link. Click Solidity Solhint INSPECTION ➤ and then click Install.
7. Restart WebStorm.

You can now get all the features of WebStorm for solidity development!

I covered the top 6 development IDEs you can use for solidity development. I used the IntelliJ IDEA plugin for Solidity, but you can pick any one of these IDEs and you can’t go wrong.

Continue to Part III — Truffle Suite

To learn more about what’s possible with Blockchain as well as develop your own project check The Blockchain Developer.

You can follow me on Medium for more posts like this and find me on Twitter as well. Are you starting your own Blockchain project, need a startup advisor? Reach out to me on Linkedin.

Published at Sun, 19 Jan 2020 20:51:18 +0000

{flickr|100|campaign}