Eclipse - Open Source Development Platform

If you're looking for a free development evironment, you should take a look at Eclipse. Eclipse is basically a project started by IBM. It accepts plug ins written for it and there are plug ins for:

Java
C++
PHP
Python
Cobol

And a lot more. The Java plug in gets installed by default, but the rest are freely downloadable. For the C++ plugin to work you'll need GCC and GDB (on linux) or MinGW or cygwin and the gnu tools on windows.

I've played around with these (just very basic stuff for now) and they seem to work relatively well. I was able to create both Java and C++ projects, compile and debug them. I had a little more trouble with PHP, it seems to be working, but my machine got very slow...I'll look at it again when I have time.

To get Eclipse, just go to: Eclipse.org