With all of the alternatives out there when starting a project, every developer goes through times when they really need to pick the right tool for the job. In his latest post on Pixelated Dreams, Davey Shafik walks you through such a thought process for a PHP application he's distributing.

This week, I wanted to write a GUI application, and spent some hours deciding what to use. Here is my list of options: Visual Basic, PHP + GTK, C + GTK, Java + AWT, Java + Swing, and Delphi. One of the major factors in this choice was that I was going to be distributing it with a PHP application, therefore I wanted it to be as cross-platform as the PHP application.

Eventually, he decides on the Netbeans IDE to develop a Java + Swing application in over the other options to provide the GUI portion of the pairing with the PHP application. Really, he could have chosen any of the options and still made a decent go at it, but it brings up a good point that a lot of developers loose sight of when working on their projects (both work and non-work related) - the right tool for the job always makes things simpler. Add on to that a little caveat that "the right tool won't work unless you know how to use it", and you can get just about anything done...