20 Useful Web Development Tools and Frameworks: "
In the early 1990s, Web sites were simple. Basic HTML allowed programmers to design sites that relayed basic information to Internet users but that could do little else.
Today, Web sites are often sophisticated and complex. Rather than a static place to present information, Web sites frequently act like business partners, performing complex tasks that can help run and even improve a business or personal endeavor.
Most programmers are not just desktop programmers, web programmers or scripting gurus – they are often required to master many different skills. Over time, most software developers find that it’s much easier to re-use code components than it is to invent the wheel every time they write an application. There are lots of coding tools to develop a website. It depends upon the types of features you’d like to implement. But when you want to save time you have to use a variety of tools to simplify the coding process. For today’s post I have created a round up of incredibly helpful tools to help you in website coding.
1. Blueprint
Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a style sheet for printing.
2. List-O-Matic
List-O-Matic is a tool that makes the process of creating list-based, CSS-styled navigation just that little bit easier.
3. Clean CSS
CleanCSS is a powerful CSS optimizer and formatter. Basically, it takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner and more concise. The CSS optimizer was originally developed by some awesome dudes over at CSS Tidy.
4. CSS Drive
Use this utility to compress your CSS to increase loading speed and save on bandwidth as well. You can choose from three levels of compression, depending on how legible you want the compressed CSS to be versus degree of compression.
5. HTML Entity Character Lookup
HTML entities is the right way to ensure all the characters on your page are validated. However, often finding the right entity code requires scanning through 250 rows of characters.
Features
- Search for entity characters based on how they look (taken from the W3C list of entities)
- Switch between standard and compressed views
- Copy the HTML entity to the clipboard
- Add your own keyword terms and characters to entities
- Settings stored in a browser cookie
- Available to be installed as a search plugin
- Available as a Firefox plugin – thanks to Yining
6. BBEdit
BBEdit is the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh. Specifically crafted in response to the needs of Web authors and software developers, this award-winning product provides an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text. An intelligent interface provides easy access to BBEdit’s best-of-class features, including grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files, project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, code folding, FTP and SFTP open and save, AppleScript, Mac OS X Unix scripting support, text and code completion, and of course a complete set of robust HTML tools.
7. Markup Generator
Markup Generator is a simple tool created for xhtml/css coders that are tired of writing boring frame code at the very beginning of slicing work. It’s main purpose is to speed up your work by generating xhtml markup and a css frame out of very intuitive, shortened syntax so you can jump directly to the elements styling.
8. HTML Cheatsheet
A handy cheat sheet, it contains the most common HTML tags and their proper syntax.
9. Venkman
Venkman is the code name for Mozilla’s JavaScript Debugger. Venkman aims to provide a powerful JavaScript debugging environment for Gecko-based browsers namely Firefox 3.x, the Netscape 7.x series of browsers, Netscape 9.x series, Mozilla Seamonkey 1.x and Mozilla Seamonkey 2.x.
10. SproutCore
SproutCore is an HTML5 application framework for building responsive, desktop-caliber apps in any modern web browser, without plugins.
11. jQueryUI
jQuery UI is an open source library of interface components — interactions, full-featured widgets, and animation effects — based on the stellar jQuery javascript library . Each component is built according to jQuery’s event-driven architecture (find something, manipulate it) and is themeable, making it easy for developers of any skill level to integrate and extend into their own code.
12. CakePHP
CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.
13. XDEBUG EXTENSION
The Xdebug extension helps you debugging your script by providing a lot of valuable debug information.
14. Pixy
Pixy is a Java program that performs automatic scans of PHP 4 source code, aimed at the detection of XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities. Pixy takes a PHP program as input, and creates a report that lists possible vulnerable points in the program, together with additional information for understanding the vulnerability.
15. PHP_CodeSniffer
PHP_CodeSniffer is a PHP5 script that tokenises and “sniffs” PHP code to detect violations of a defined set of coding standards. It is an essential development tool that ensures that your code remains clean and consistent. It can even help prevent some common semantic errors made by developers. A coding standard, in PHP_CodeSniffer, is a collection of sniff files. Each sniff file checks one part of the coding standard only. Multiple coding standards can be used within PHP_CodeSniffer, so that the one installation can be used across multiple projects.
16. Mini AJAX
MiniAjax is a large collection of downloadable AJAX scripts, for customization on your site. Most of these scripts are configurable, and guide you through the implementation.
17. Clean AJAX
Clean is an open source engine for AJAX, that provides a high level interface to work with the AJAX technology.It can be plugged in any page or DHTML framework because it was designed in conformation with the separation of concerns principle, keeping focus on AJAX issues.
18. Rialto
Rialto (Rich Internet Application Toolkit) for brevity is an ajax-based cross browser javascript widgets library. Because it is technology agnostic it can be encapsulated in JSP, JSF,.Net, Python or PHP graphic components. The purpose of Rialto is to ease the access to rich internet application development to corporate developers. Ideally a Rialto developer have neither need to write or understand DHTML, Ajax or DOMcode.
19. AjaxDaddy
This site offers a bunch of cool javascript snippets such as jquery slideshows, galleries, auto complete text field widgets, jquery carousels, tooltips and many more.
You will see every javascript demo in action and the sources are included. The embeded javascript editor will allow you to make changes and view the result on the fly. The collection of scripts covers everything from jquery plugins to ajax examples.
20. ThinWire
Rich Web Applications, Made Simple! That is the motto of ThinWire. ThinWire is a community driven LGPL open source development framework that allows you to easily build applications for the web that have responsive, expressive & interactive user interfaces. Use ThinWire to handle the view-layer of your Java EE (J2EE) application and you’ll be able to provide an unparalleled user experience, while at the same time completing your project faster than ever. Just visit our download page and try out the framework.
Author : Dustin Betonio
Dustin Betonio begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting is a Translation Management graduate at University of Mindanao. His earlier career was devoted on customer service outside the information highway. Currently studying Law in the same University.
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