A development environment is a set of tools and functionalities that enable a programmer to develop, test, and debug the source code of an application or a program. The development environments are designed to make it easy for the programmer to go through the entire process of making a software.
A development environment supports the three major steps of the entire development process with a tiered structure of environments:
The number of environments inside a development environment can vary depending on the need of the developers.
The development server is used for writing the code and running it on the local machine to check if the code is working well.
Once the development is done, we move on to the staging phase, where we try to replicate the production server environment to test our build. This is necessary to make sure that the build is reliable and behaves as expected.
Once the application performs well enough on the staging server, it is then pushed to the production server, where it goes live.
The term development environment is often used in place of the term integrated development environment (IDE).
An IDE is a development tool used to write, edit, test, and debug code. It might also contain a compiler or an interpreter. Along with this, many IDEs offer features like auto code completion, syntax highlighting, etc., to make the development process much faster. IDEs are designed to maximize programmers’ productivity.
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