It is said that some of the best things in life are free. This is certainly true regarding God’s Grace, and on a much, much lesser scale, true with regards to a nifty programmer’s tool called Open Perl IDE.

Open Perl IDE is a Win32-based, integrated development environment for writing, editing, updating your Perl scripts. But that’s not all. You can also debug Perl scripts local on your PC with any standard perl distribution under Windows 95/98/NT/2000/whatever.

I’ve been using this tool since about mid-November and it has been nothing less than a God-send. It is what helped me hack away at a script I use to parse my pastor’s sermons into legible HTML. The debugging feature was especially useful in pointing out little omissions and stuff that drive you nuts when you attempt to debug from client to server. Here are just some of the features this free/Open Source (distributed under the Mozilla Public Licence 1.1) offers:

• Customizable Perl Syntax Coloring.
• Complete encapsulation of “perl.exe”.
• Erroneous script lines will be listed on run, compile or debug. The first error-line is marked in editor window.

Insertion and deletion of conditional breakpoints.

• View and edit of variables in a watch tree.

Hint-Evaluation: Variables under the mouse-cursor will be evaluated and shown as hint.

• Callstack info, List of loaded modules.
• Highly configurable, integrated help system.
• Flexible environment with dockable windows. Each configuration can be saved as an IDE-Desktop.
• It is possible to use different desktop-settings for Edit, Run and Debug modes.

Now if I could find a comparable product for PHP, I’d be set!