t must be tough being a web developer, say if you’re stuck in the 1980s where everything must be done manually. But these days, even with the daily bouts to beat deadlines, hurdle pressures and avoid burn out, there are essential tools that offer plenty of relief. Here are a selection of must have tools for web development to get started.
The World of Web Development
Web development is pretty all about a lot customization, editing and modifying of a website. The rate of success in building a website is determined largely by getting your task accomplished efficiently and quickly.
Yes, time is very critical in any web development work; yet it’s also about the quality,from the tidiness of your codes, ensuring they’re bug-free, to ensuring a professionally coded website was done.
And there’s like no more excuse for the passionate developers not to accomplish an outstanding work because the availability of essential tools for web developers, from coding, file sharing, hosting, to testing are offered either free or premium.
Command Line Tools
Here are a couple of useful command line tools for web developers who want to code more quickly and efficiently well without a GUI:
WP-CLI – Offers a set of command line tools that lets you run WordPress commands. It also provides an interface with the platform albeit the command line.
Drush – For Drupal web developers, this is a fantastic shell interface that makes developers automate Drupal tasks directly from the command line.
Code Editor Tools
Coding can be a little drowning when once you’re already deep in web programming. But tools let web developers focus on their coding and not mind other tasks that may come in the way of completing this task.
There are must have tools for development designed with superb UI, shortcuts and flexibility. All these features make development of a website effortless and stress-free.
Coda – For Mac users, this is an ideal all-in-one web developer suite. As well as an FTP client, Coda provides terminal access, and a whole lot more features to keep web development an efficient undertaking.
Sublime Text – Are you looking for a tool that lets you do batch edits using multiple line editing? Beside its very sophisticated interface, Sublime Text and you is a match made in coding space.
Version Control Tools
If you want a storage of your code’s current and past versions, there are version control tools that are easily available to meet your needs.
These version control tools let developers to test, compare and finally merge changes, as well as allow for backing up of codes.Web development time is the biggest benefit of using version control tools.
Some of these tools allow your team from the U.S. to collaboratively code with your teammates from Manila and let you all accomplish the same project notwithstanding the distance.
GitHub – One of the most popular tools meant for version control tasks is GitHub. Git is said to be perfect for coding collaboratively with your team because it allows you to put your codes publicly.
Git offers you and your team a lot of room to perform code review and code management as well.
BeanStalk – For code repositories, this web development tool is awesome in making collaboration possible through Git.
Multiple teams working together but remotely would find no problem getting a project done collaboratively since BeanStalk save your codes anywhere.
There are also other features that allow you to send and save your codes to your server automatically. An added benefit is letting you see an overview of your team’s active repositories and users who are associated with the project.
Virtual Dev’t Environments
When developers want to simulate the experience of operating platforms and various browsers is likewise known as virtualization. Compared with other processes, such environments let you perform experimentation locally while allowing you to store projects.
ExpanDrive–A cloud storage that acts like your USB drive. But the main difference is that this tool acts as your drive for Amazon S3 and FTP/SFTP connections.
MAMP Pro –This is a smart choice when developing locally using Mac. MAMP Pro is a suitable platform for collaboration because it is packed with MySQL, Apache and PHP that can integrate directly into your OS X.
Server Performance
Keeping servers optimally working and online are responsibilities even developers must learn how to perform. When servers go offline, tools that can readily check or monitor server performance are helpful.
For web developers, some tools help perform the best alternative course of action in cases of emergencies. There are also some that developers can use when evaluating the status of infrastructure and resources.
New Relic – Rated outstanding by not a few web developers, this tool has been said to be perfect for monitoring and analyzing performance from the browser to the database of your resources and infrastructure.
Browser Testing and Debugging
As web developers, we are accountable to bringing superior web experience to our visitors. For us, this means ensuring that our online presence load quickly and render perfectly well in almost all web and mobile screen resolutions.
A couple of tools are now getting web developers rejoice for providing them a platform to test websites on almost every browser and screen sizes.
More importantly, must have tools for web development like these are making developers’ jobs glitch-free.
Chrome Developer Tools – Google’s Chrome offers kit with plenty of web authoring and debugging tools for developers to test browser compatibility straight into Chrome.
Web Developer’s Tools for Firefox – These Firefox plugins let web developers to perform troubleshooting, debugging, and editing codes without leaving the popular Mozilla browser.
BrowserStack – The tool provides developers a more secure and comprehensive resources to perform live and browser-based test of their websites.
There’s also the added feature of letting you test with instant access to every desktop, tablet and mobile browsers.
Summing Up
Web development tools provide the programmers or coders with the best assistance in performing their job exceptionally well and on time. Thankfully today, there are lots of available tools for web developers that they can choose from.
Web developers need the right tools to code and program web pages. The motivation must always be perked up to bring out the very best they can offer to develop beautiful and functional websites that visitors will love.
Read our above list of must have tools for web development and see for yourself which of those are suited to help you accomplish your development needs.