Web Developer's and Designer's Toolbox

PHP is one of the most widely used open-source server-side scripting languages that exist today. With over 20 million indexed domains using PHP, including major websites like Facebook, Digg and WordPress, there are good reasons why many Web developers prefer it to other server-side scripting languages, such as Python and Ruby.

PHP is faster (updated), and it is the most used scripting language in practice; it has detailed documentation, a huge community, numerous ready-to-use scripts and well-supported frameworks; and most importantly, it's much easier to get started with PHP than with other scripting languages (Python, for example). That's why it makes perfect sense to provide the huge community of PHP developers with an overview of useful tools and resources that can make their development process easier and more effective.

This post presents 50 useful PHP tools that can significantly improve your programming workflow . Among other things, you'll find a plethora of libraries and classes that aid in debugging, testing, profiling and code-authoring in PHP.

I've been using Komodo IDE at my work because it's the best web developer editor but If I wanna do my work at home, I would need to buy the license which is worth $295.00 which I can't afford. Good thing though that Activestate has release an open version of Komodo IDE which called "Komodo Edit".

Komodo Edit Features:
*All the languages: Dynamic language expertise for Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl, plus JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and XML, and template languages like RHTML, Template-Toolkit, HTML-Smarty and Django.

*All the platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux.

*Award-wining tools: Tools like autocomplete and calltips, multi-language file support, syntax coloring and syntax checking, Vi emulation, Emacs key bindings, and more.

*Firefox-style extensibility:Download some of the cool extensions from member of the Komodo community.

Get the latest version of Komodo Edit here.

Notepad++ is a free source code editor which supports several programming languages running under the M$ Windows environment.It's a grat replacement for Notepad. This project, based on Scintilla edit component (a very powerful editor component) and written in C++ with pure win32 api (i.e. without MFC, that ensures the higher execution speed and smaller size of the program), is under the GPL Licence.

Features:

· Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding : Supported languages : C, C++, Java, C#, XML, HTML, PHP, Javascript, RC resource file, makefile, ASCII art file (extension .nfo, doxygen, ini file, batch file, ASP, VB/VBS source files, SQL, Objective-C, CSS, Pascal, Perl, Python and Lua.

· WYSIWYG : If you have a colour printer, print your source code (or whatever you want) in colour.

· Style Configurator : For each style in every supported language, user can change the background/foreground colour, the font, font size and font style ( bold or Italic ) via the Style Configurator Dialog.

· User Define Syntax Highlighting : It allows user to define his own language : not only the syntax highlighting keywords, but also the syntax folding keywords, comment keywords and the operators.

· And more

Download Notepad++

Smashing Apps is one of those great site for free softwares and applications that can make our daily lives easier. And with that thought, I am now sharing these nice tools for Web Developers and Designers can use to make your jobs easier.

13 Free Web Apps To Simplify Designer's Work Life

17 Wonderful Free Tools To Make Designers Lives Easier!

23 Free And Online Web Based Applications Specially If You Are Designer Or Developer

Many people think of Twitter apps when they think of Adobe AIR, but there is a whole other world of useful applications out there beyond microblogging.

Designers and developers in particular get a lot of love from the AIR community with tools to help them with just about every aspect of their jobs. Here are over 30 great Adobe AIR apps for designers and developers that can help you do everything from tracking your time to measuring pixels, and more.

30+ Great Adobe AIR Apps for Designers and Developers

As a web developer, if you're to be successful, you have to have a constant yearning for learning new things. In an industry that evolves rapidly, you've got to keep up or you risk being obsolete and outdated. Keeping up with trends, weeding out the fads, and adopting new techniques to your web-building arsenal is an essential part of being a web developer

here are 20 websites that can broadened your knowledge, expanded your skill set, and improved the quality and efficiency of your web development projects.

20 Websites That Can Make Us Better Web Developers

FirePHP enables you to print to your Firebug Console using a simple PHP function call.

FirePhp is ideally suited for AJAX development where clean JSON or XML responses are required. All data is sent via a set of X-FirePHP-Data response headers. This means that the debugging data will not interfere with the content on your page.

You must have Firebug installed and the "Net" panel enabled to use this extension.
You must also download a PHP library from http://www.firephp.org/

FireScope is a Firefox add-on that integrates with Firebug, to extend it with reference material for HTML and CSS.

The extension's core functionality is centered around a new Reference panel, which contains a search tool for looking up HTML elements, attributes, and CSS properties.

The extension also hooks into context-menus in the HTML and CSS panels, the DOM crumbtrail, and the Inspector, adding options to look up a selected item (ie. search for it in the Reference panel) or to view a code example.

More about Firescope here

The User Agent Switcher extension adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser. It is designed for Firefox, Flock and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Download for Firefox/Flock/Seamonkey

Having a hard time on working on your PHP codes, here's a nice website that you can visit.

At Free-Php.net, you will find a categorized listing of free php scripts, commercial php scripts, php resources, php tutorials, web resources, php hosting and more.

The ultimate colour picker for programmers and web developers.

This little chap is the bees-knees for the sometimes-tricky task of getting your web colours just right. It has a variable level zoom to help pin-point the colour you want. It can also average colours in a 3x3 or 5x5 block for you and snap colours to the neatest web-friendly value. Colours can be displayed in RGB, HTML, Delphi, PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, or Visual C++ formats. You can have your chosen colour sent to the clipboard ready for pasting. There's a colour history and more. There's not a lot more you could ask of such a utility.

• Click here to go to homepage.
• Click here to download.

I use the term CSS hacks and workarounds interchangeably, because the word "hack" almost brings a negative connotation to mind. But in essence, many of these hacks are simply patches, which is why I use the term this way. Keep in mind, however, that some of the more laborious hacks may not allow your CSS files to validate, especially the ones that utilize some JavaScript. Below will be some common problems experienced in Internet Explorer and their hacks. This, of course, is not an all-inclusive guide, and will probably miss a few you like, so please forgive this ahead of time.


Click here for more on "Workarounds for Internet Explorer"

SQLeonardo a powerful and easy-to-use tool that lets you query databases. When you work in SQLeonardo, you work in a graphical environment and working with data in this environment means you don't need to understand SQL, the standard programming language for talking to databases.

Works with any JDBC compliant database (ORACLE, MS SQLServer, MySQL, DB2, FiREBiRD, HSQLDB) and supports multiple concurrent connections.

MetadataExplorer
* browse database structure as tables, views, keys, indices etc.
* search tables and columns

CommandEditor

* create, edit, and execute SQL scripts
* generate insert, update and delete statements through a wizard

QueryBuilder

* create SQL queries without directly writing SQL

DataGrid

* navigate database through his data
* edit tables directly via the data grid
* generate SQL statements for any change
* import/export data

Download the software here

You've designed the perfect website. You're checking it in all browsers. Firefox - check, Safari - check, Opera - check, Internet Explorer - ah, am I looking at a website? We've all been there. Until Microsoft starts supporting web standards, properly coded websites are always going to look like crap in IE. That's a shame because Internet Explorer is (unfortunately) the most popular browser. So, how do you make your website look great in Internet Explorer while maintain standards for all browsers? Here are some tips that I gather from various guides around the internet.

Read more about it here

This article is for those who are new into the Ubuntu Linux environment and want to continue their web development projects on that environment.


Here is the complete guide on how to install XAMPP on Ubuntu Linux

1.)Research what keywords people most often on search engines that pertain to your products or services; use these keywords as text in the design to increase website traffic.


2.)Keep It Simple - 99% of all web designers use too many graphical images and programs like Java, Flash, etc. which results in lower rankings and less traffic.


3.)Limit the number of times that you repeat words in your Keyword Meta Tag.


4.)Place your important keywords at the top of the page as text headers.


5.)Once a website is indexed, a good web designer should go back and improve pages that didn't get high rankings on key words.


6.)Every 3 months you should make a small change on each web page. Search engines like to see that changes are being made to a site and that it just isn't sitting there for years with no upgrades.

If you're a web developer or designer new to the concept of web standards and are undecided on whether you should spend the time to learn all about them or not, here are some of the most important reasons for doing so.


For web professionals who are already using web standards, this list may come in handy when you need good arguments. And feel free to add any additional benefits you can think of.


1. Make yourself look professional

Other web developers and potential employers will be able to look at your work and know that you are a person who likes to keep up with changes in technology and make sure that your knowledge and skills are always current. It will make you look like a real web professional.


2. Make your clients look good

Use web standards combined with best practices for accessibility and give your clients a chance to talk about how they cater to all people, and how they find it important that everybody can use their services or find information about their products. You will also avoid the bad publicity that can be caused by shutting out visitors like disabled people, Mac users, and mobile phone users.


3. Maximize the number of potential visitors

You don't know which device visitors will use to access your site. You may think you know, but unless you're building an Intranet for a company that has a policy on which browsers may be used you really have no idea.

The only thing you can be reasonably sure of is that they are using something that can parse HTML. By using web standards properly you make sure that you have done your part in making your site work with the largest possible number of browsing devices.


4. Faster loading and reduced bandwidth usage

Well-structured markup that separates structure and content from presentation is generally much more compact than table-and-spacer-image-based tag soup. Documents will be smaller and faster for visitors to download. Like it or not, there are still many, many people connecting to the Internet through dialup.

If your site has a hosting plan with a limit on free bandwidth usage, smaller documents will reduce costs - provided traffic doesn't increase.


5. Provide the foundation for accessibility

Using web standards does not guarantee that all aspects of your site will be accessible to people with disabilities, but it is a very good start. Make sure your documents are valid, well-structured, and semantic, and you're well on the way towards having an accessible site.


6. Improve search engine rankings

Well-written content delivered through clean, well-structured, and semantic markup is delicious food for search engine spiders and will help your rankings. This, of course, will lead to increased traffic, which is what most website owners want.
7. Make your markup easier to maintain

Would you rather wade through many kilobytes of multiply nested tables and spacer images or just browse through a clean and well-structured document when you need to update your site?

Removing, inserting or editing presentation-free content is much easier and more efficient than having to make sure you get all the presentational cruft right. Using CSS to control layout also makes it much easier to make site-wide design changes.

8. Future-proof content


There is no way anyone can guarantee with 100% certainty that the documents created and stored electronically today will be readable in a hundred years. Or even fifty years. But if you separate content from presentation and use current web standards, you have done the best you can to ensure that your content can still be read even after you're gone.

9. Good business sense


Why would any business owner say no to more visitors? A faster site? Improved search engine rankings? Potential good publicity? It doesn't make sense to do so.

10. It's the right way to do things

The web standards way is the way we should have built the web from the beginning. And now that we can, why not do something the right way and have a really excellent reason to feel good about yourself.

source:456 Bereat St.