Posted 29 January 2007

Having recently left a five-year stint at Adobe, I became accustomed to the world of expensive software. Now that I’m doing web development on my own, I’ve been amazed at the diversity and quality of free tools. I think this has some serious implications for the future of the software business, but that’s a topic for another post… right now, I just want to rave about a few of these great tools.

Firebug—A Must-Have Web Developer Tool

The Firebug extension for Firefox is a life-changing product for web developers. If you’re doing web development and you’re not already using it, go get it right now! Among many other capabilities, you can:

• Edit the HTML and CSS for a page you’re viewing and see the results instantly. This is very nice when you’re tweaking stuff to get it just right. It doesn’t save the files, so when you’re done you still have to go fix your source files, but it makes quick iterative experiments much easier.

• View the source for the page in a pane, either the HTML, or the CSS, or the JavaScript.

• Hover over an item on the page and see the corresponding HTML code highlighted, or vice versa, and see the cascade of styles applied to any element.

• See the timing for how the page was loaded, file by file.

• Debug the JavaScript code.

And lots more. Don’t work on web development without this.

IE Tab—Internet Explorer within Firefox

While we’re on the subject of Firefox extensions, I find IE Tab to be a great help. Browser rendering issues are a major nightmare in web development. Install the IE Tab Firefox extension, and with one click you can switch the rendering engine for any tab back and forth between IE and Firefox. My only wish is that it also would let me switch between IE 6 and IE 7.

RadRails—Ruby on Rails IDE

RadRails is a cross-platform Ruby on Rails development environment based on Eclipse. You get not only a nice Ruby editor, but also an integrated Subversion client and database browser. There’s integrated support for creating Mongrel servers for each app, and an integrated browser for viewing them. There’s also GUI access to the various Rails scripts, RI, and RDoc, though I’ve found this part less compelling.

Cygwin—Linux utilities for Windows

Cygwin is a tremendous collection of GNU tools ported to Windows. I know, if you have a “real” computer you don’t need this… but for those of us using Windows machines and also doing Linux server work, it’s a great convenience.

SQLyog—GUI for MySQL Database Management

SQLyog is a very nice GUI for managing MySQL databases. The free community edition unfortunately lacks some key features, like SSH tunneling, but it is still quite useful. And the Enterprise version is less than $50 for a single user (and even less for non-commercial use).

PuTTY—SSH Client for Windows

PuTTY is a Telnet and SSH client for Windows. An essential tool for working with remote Linux servers from Windows. Also part of the fully PuTTY package is Pageant, which enables you to use SSH keys on a Windows box for authentication with remote systems. (See my article on Using SSH Keys to Speed Login.)

WinSCP—SFTP Client for Windows

WinSCP is an open-source secure FTP client for Windows. This make it easy to securely browse remote filesystems.

JungleDisk—Cross-Platform Client for Amazon S3

JungleDisk turns Amazon’s S3 storage service into an easy-to-use virtual drive on a PC, Mac, or Linux box. This is a very inexpensive way to get easy remote storage. Great for backups or for moving files between systems.