Product Reviews
CodeWarrior Development Tools for Windows Version 8
Sometimes Microsoft-centric developers think the world ends at Visual
Studio, but that's still not quite true. Metrowerks has been shipping
development tools for years, and CodeWarrior is a full-featured IDE, compiler,
linker, and debugger for C, C++, or Java code. The company also has versions
for other platforms ranging from Mac to Linux to Solaris to Palm (among
others), making this an interesting tool for people doing cross-platform
development.
What you'll find in the CodeWarrior box is a couple of CDs: one includes
the development environment and tools, the other is packed with documentation.
Indeed, the documentation can be overwhelming; you get a pile of stuff
about how the IDE works, and then tons of platform-specific information
and tutorials. It's all in there somewhere, but I found myself missing
some of the advanced features of the more recent Visual Studio help.
There wasn't anything missing in the development environment, though.
It manages projects consisting of multiple files well, and jumps back
and forth between files, headers, and symbols easily. There's supportr
for MFC 6 and ATL 3.0 on the C++ side, and JDK 1.3 and 1.4 on the Java
side. The graphical diff and merge tool is fast and well-designed. You
get Metrowerk's own thread-safe standard libraries, an open API for tool
integration, and of course CVS/VSS support.
I don't push the C++ envelope myself; everything I tried to do with CodeWarrior
worked fine. Metrowerks claims a "best in class" optimizing ANSI/ISO compiler;
I can't evaluate that, but I can say that everything worked. It seems
to me that if you're planning a project that needs strong cross-platform
support with a consistent IDE, this would be a great way to write it.
[This review originally appeared in
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.