Tools of the trade

Sep 1, 2007 ide-and-web-dev-tools misc-web

This post is more than 18 months old. Since technology changes too rapidly, this content may be out of date (but that's not always the case). Please remember to verify any technical or programming information with the current release.

I just thought I’d drop some useful links and tools your way for those beginning and non-tool-cist peoples:

http://getfirebug.com/ Used for js/css/dom debugging - additionally, even Yahoo is building upon this. I’ve used this a lot for AJAX request debugging as well.

http://zend.com/pdt Zend eclipse project - get the full package - this is a ton of PHP tools from Zend (the PHP company) built on top of Eclipse (for those Java tool lovers out there)

Aptana Useful for css/javascript editing in eclipse - or as a standalone

Mysql Gui Tools A nice gui browser for mysql - I know I know - us diehards - we shouldn’t need this - but it is still nice (you can also get plugins for eclipse to do the same thing with jdbc)

Pietty + Putty Pietty - a putty plugin - allows for true transparency of putty windows - amazingly cool - at first its in some oriental language - and when you first open it up - you can’t read the screen when you first ssh somewhere. Never fear: just go to the encoding menu option and choose utf-8 - otherwise works like a dream. SSH to your heart’s content.

Komodo If you don’t like Eclipse or the long time it takes to load, you can use Komodo. Plus, version 4 brings some lovely things to the table. Thats right, Lovely (and thats not cuz they gave me a shirt either…)

PHPDoc Phpdoc for windows - has a nice gui for using phpdoc - what we use for documentation because its easy to customize and launch. (I have been using an eclipse tool though lately that I wrote….)

That’s about it - if you know any other cool tools, post them in the comments!