Over the years most web developers will have built an arsenal of tools or ‘tools of the trade’. Recently I discovered rsync and I am surprised how I managed to live without it all these years. What tools do you consider to be the most compelling? Please stick to the ones you use on a regular basis and swear by. They can also be frameworks, platforms, editors and whatever else you think web developers ought to be using (jquery, joomla, xdebug, vi, notepad++, etc).
I’ll start off with a couple:
- rsync – ‘One click’ sync to live servers or vice-versa
- mysqldump – used alongside rsync to sync the databases
- test styles bookmarklet – live css editor bookmarklet which beats the heck out of the ‘edit > save > reload’ cycle by allowing live editing.
- javascript shell – javascript shell window attached to a window
- firebug – advanced javascript/css/dom debugger
- php-shell – I use this regularly for quickly testing statements, functions, classes or scripts
- CSS-Discuss Wiki – I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find a solution to your CSS problem on this wiki (in which case you should add it)
- Font Matrix – Helps me choose font stacks
- PHPMyAdmin – I’m certain everyone uses this for managing their MySQL databases but thought I’d add it to the list for good measure
Even though I have highlighted tools in the LAMP environment, you may mention tools you use in your environment.
LAMP stack development
(I focused on LAMP since that is what I use for web development)