Who Needs Actions Web Development and Software Blog by James Riley

My Development Environment

Occasionally I meet other Web Developers, despite my efforts to avoid them – and one of the very first questions I am asked is what set up I use for developing my websites. After a quick glance around me to check for the presence of any females, I launch into my well rehearsed explanation, and here I share it with the world:

NetBeans – my web development career (if you can call it that) began with Microsoft Frontpage, before moving onto Dreamweaver and finally settling on NotePad. By this stage my ego had quadrupled in size yet quickly popped when I dived into dynamic programming languages such as PHP and Ruby on Rails. I quickly realised that with NotePad – less is not always more.

So I grabbed NetBeans and have never looked back. It contains all your regular IDE benefits such as code colouring, file management, is open source, powerful search, task lists etc. But what ma

kes NetBeans stand out for me is its Ruby on Rails support – being able to carry out all your command line activities from within the IDE saves me a lot of time. With Ruby on Rails being the speedy framework that it is, I feel it a necessity to meet it half way.

NotePad++ - As described above, I once had feelings for the NotePad that comes with Windows, I saw a future for us and on more than one occasion gave it a little squeeze when the opportunity arose. Yet NotePad++ proved to me that there are better fish in the sea – a quick look at the feature list will show you why this is an application every developer should have installed.

There are many occasions where opening a full-blown IDE is overkill for the task at hand (editing a single file or putting together a short script) and this is where NotePad++ will enter the room and apply just enough pressure to gently soothe that ache. Give it a go.

Photoshop CS3 – The tool of choice for the majority of Web and Graphic designers, Photoshop has a long history and a new version seems to see its release almost yearly – which occasionally confuses me as I can’t tell the difference to Photoshop 7. None the less, I use Photoshop for almost all of the graphical work I do and couldn’t recommend it enough.

NaviCat – This application may be the least known out of those mentioned here but is a powerful database management tool, with different versions supporting either MySQL, Oracle and PortgreSQL. I manage many different databases online nothing compares to the speed and efficiency of Navicat for tasks such as: Import/Export of data, updating, deleting, inserting records, generating reports, handling users etc. A notable feature here is Navicat's own backup and restore system which has been a life saver on occasions where I’ve had to switch servers and transfer large database files – reliably and in a short time.

Leave a comment with the programs you use most often, not that such a task requires a launch party or anything...