Essential Tools for Web Developers
July 29, 2007 – 5:53 pmFrom a static html page to creating a Content Management System from scratch, there are certain tools that increase productivity geometrically. Here I present the tools that have greatly enhanced my own productivity and our team.
Operating System
I prefer Ubuntu with Windows XP and Windows Vista running under VMware. There are some tools mentioned below that must be run in Windows (and also Quickbooks) and that may not work so well under Wine. I have not had a chance to play with OS X, but I plan to hack an Apple TV soon.
Browser
My primary browser is Firefox; however, I run IE6 and Safari in Windows XP under VMware and IE7 with Vista under VMware for testing purposes. I use the web developer, firebug and del.icio.us extensions for Firefox, taking care to disable firebug for regular browsing (firebug greatly reduced performance).
IDE
For lightweight editing I have found nothing better than VI or VIM. For larger projects, such as Ruby on Rails or Symfony projects, I use Aptana.
Database Design
I prefer a whiteboard (when working with a team) or good ol’ paper and pencil. However, I have found DBDesigner 4 (later to become MySQL Workbench) to be an excellent computer based tool.
Architecture Design
Again, I prefer a whiteboard or paper and pencil. A great computer based tool is ArgoUML.
Design and Prototyping
Since a prototype is supposed to be thrown away and may require many changes before finalized, I find it most productive to use a rough sketch on pencil and paper. Once things get close to finalized, there is nothing better than Photoshop. I run Photoshop within Ubuntu in VMware. If you are on a budget, I suggest you use the Gimp.
Flash
If I need to create something quick I will use the excellent and affordable Swish. When I have a more complex project or I’m working with a purchased flash template, then there is no choice but Adobe Flash.
Communications
Our team has standardized on Skype. It is a good idea to invest in a good headseat/mic combo. You will find use for it also when creating screen capture demonstrations. For email I prefer GMail and for a calendar I use Google Calendar (the whole team has an account and we share our schedules for easy coordination).
Bug/Issue Tracking
We use Trac to keep track of all feature requests, bugs and todo lists. It’s milestone feature helps keep us on track. I also recommend RT or Eventum, both are good systems.
Version Control
In school CVS meant save your ass… And indeed it did many times. Now is no different, but we use a more sophisticated tool, Subversion.
FTP, SCP, Shell
gFTP does the job nicely in Ubuntu. Putty is the tool to use in a Windows or PocketPC environment. The Bash shell is magical, nothing more to see here.
Web Desktop
Netvibes.com is an excellent website to keep all your main web applications a click away no matter where you are.
Web Tools
The W3 HTML and CSS validators help keep you standards compliant, but don’t get too obsessed as we engineers tend to do. Sometimes you must let go…
The links here are keys for design.
I mind map allot on paper, but sometimes its useful to share these maps digitally. For that I recommend free mind or Mindmeister.
Command Line
Get familiar with tail (view your logs in real time), diff (easily compare files) and grep (searching to the max).
Post your favorite productivity enhancers in the comments.
Oh, I forgot one… add Digg.com to your blocked sites list.
Elmer Thomas Jr. is Co-founder of ATL Innovations, Inc., an award winning web and software development company dedicated to bridging the digital divide and ThemBid.com, a service offering free advertising for businesses that makes finding services and products easy for consumers. You can find out more about Mr. Thomas at ATLInnovations.com and ElmerThomas.com.
6 Responses to “Essential Tools for Web Developers”
Your list is great. I’ve switched to Ubuntu from Windows, after the server kept crashing randomly every few hours even after a fresh install. ssh and scp is great.
For firefox, I’d like to add “HTML Validator”.
For the IDE, Eclipse rocks.
By Stephen on Jul 30, 2007
My thoughts:
I tried Aptana but I found nothing really interesting. It just look an split of the standard Eclipse IDE, but with outdated/bad support for well known libraries. For example it includes both Mocho and Dojo Javascript libraries. Both are updated and there is no sense to include both. Choose one (in my own experience Dojo is much better/less buggy). Still Eclipse is great!!! (and that comes from someone who doesn’t like java at all).
Check also a good web framework before starting to type (the good programer types few and read a lot). My favourite is is Plone, a Zope/Python generic CMS but that can be easily customized with Archetypes and that out of the box implements i18n, strong security based on rolls, complex media management (html documents, multimedia, BLOB,…), integrated object relational database (with great support for standard relational databases through “SQL templates”), high-performance search engine, stable API (since +2.5), fantastic template system (in which JSF was based), “inteligent folders” (stored search), easy to “cluster”, advanced cache framework, and thousand of other nice and usefull features. The step-learning curve is high, but it really is worth the effort.
By Shamar on Aug 1, 2007
Hmmm good list. But why is dreamweaver not mentioned anywhere?
By Arun Thomas on Aug 1, 2007
Arun: I’m sure dreamweaver is not mentioned because it’s not necessary. To be a true web developer, you can use dreamweaver or any other editor.
Kompozer and NvU are good alternatives as is Amaya. If you know XHTML, any IDE will work.
(I use Dreamweaver only because I like it. But I’ve used and sometimes still use those others mentioned above. But when it comes to ASP.NET 2.0, nothing beats Visual Studio. You’re ASP.NET 2.0 development will be crippled without it.)
By Sean McGee on Aug 1, 2007
Nice tips, really fine.
I use Quanta for web development and to write my PHP scripts to. I like Quanta because it “guess” and do some stuff that really save me time.
But my post is about what u suggest and not what I do. I found argoUML very nice.
my rate: star * 5
By Celso Timana on Aug 1, 2007