In this digital world, the role of a web application is highly important. To create those kinds of applications we need some tools. Those are known as Web Development Tools. As a Web Developer, you must familiar with a wide variety of such tools to become exceptional in the growing developer community. Keep the following in your arsenal of tools if not existing already.
The best one out of these tools depends on the necessity. So, choose it wisely while developing your website.
Sublime Text
- The Sublime Text is a Code Editor.
- It has an efficient & clean UI.
- Navigation between files & multi-tasking reduces the overall time on the project.
- With multi selection feature, you can do several things at a time. Not required to direct manually to any part of the code and edit separately.
- It has a Command Palette.
- It supports a variety of Plugins that makes coding easier.
jQuery
- Most prominent web development language.
- Ease of use & it is multi-browser access.
- It can work as an AMD module.
- When minified it is a 30 KB module.
- We can manipulate DOM elements by means of built-in functions.
- It is free and open source.
Chrome DevTools
- These are a powerful set of tools that allow you to change the Dom and page style while also giving you the functionality to view the messages and run and debug your code in JavaScript.
- You can inspect network activity & gain knowledge about the various kinds of requests your browser is making.
- The tools also provide several other panels such as a security panel, elements panel, etc. These features help you to optimize your website.
- It is free.
GitHub
- It is a version control system.
- It is an open-source repository.
- It provides essential services such as bug tracking, task management, etc
- It is a perfect place to roll out new projects.
Sass
- Sass stands for Syntactically Awesome Style Sheet.
- It is a CSS extension language.
- Since it is compatible with CSS, it allows us to utilize various CSS libraries.
- It needs to be installed in your project before you can use it.
- It has useful features that plain CSS can’t provide such as Arguments, Variable Loops & Nesting.
- Sass also supports multiple inheritances.
- It makes it easy to manage large style sheets.
- It is free.
AngularJS
- It is a front-end development tool by Google.
- It allows you to be more expressive and readable while also reducing your time requirements.
- Angular works on HTML.
- Data binding in angular eliminates DOM manipulation.
- You can re-use the code to create different sections of the same website.
- It is providing built-in testability.
CodePen
- It is an online editor.
- It provides web design & development functionalities.
- Since it is like an IDE you can create your entire project by using CodePen.
- CodePen is a paid tool and can be useful for business.
- In CodePen, we can drag & drop images, SVG files, JSON, CSS files & media files.
- More than one person can write & edit the code at the same time in collaboration mode.
Web.com
- Web.com is a Web Development Company
- It gives the power to customize the CSS & HTML of our website by using the coding languages such as Python & PHP etc
- It aims to make it easy the development of a website
- Since it is very easy to use, we can use it in Drupal as well as in Spotify by clicking a button
- This is an extremely powerful tool, hence you should add this to your weapons
- Due to its feature do-it-yourself, you can personalize your website in a beautiful way
- It provides unlimited access to the MySQL database
- It supports FTP accounts.
- By using this, we can automate the restoration & backup of our website.
Grunt
- We are using this to cut the repetitive tasks in JavaScript.
- The tasks are compilation and unit testing minification to name one or two.
- By using this, we can add different kinds of plugins to our website, hence the overall project quality will improve.
- Grunt helps us to automate anything with minimum effort.
- It gives access to plugins as well as helps to create our own plugin.
- Its installation is very easy.
TypeScript
- It is one of the open-source web development languages.
- It is the superset of JavaScript.
- Since it is the superset of JavaScript, it is doing the same tasks that JavaScript can do and many more.
- The browser is not able to understand the code written in TypeScript. Hence before implementation, the code written in TypeScript will convert to JavaScript by compiling it.
- Since it is Static, we can’t change the variables used in the code in between the code.
- Since JavaScript is Dynamic, we can change the variables while executing the code.
- This is the primary source of generating unwanted bugs in JavaScript.
- You will gain insights into different JavaScript libraries and access to the latest JavaScript libraries.
- After the compilation of TypeScript code, we can run it in any JavaScript engine that supports ECMAScript.
- We can run the code in the browser & node.js after compiling the TypeScript code.
- We can add interfaces between different software components.
NPM
- Node.js is a runtime environment that helps to execute the JavaScript outside of the browser.
- Node.js was released in 2009. After that, a lot of websites & web apps are built using this.
- The success behind Node.js is NPM – Node Package Manager.
- NPM has two parts, which are a CLI and an Online Repository.
- A CLI or Command Line Interface used to publish and download packages into our system.
- The Online Repositories are used by other developers to ease the workflow by downloading the packages from it.
- It is one of the best free and open-source solutions in the market.
Bootstrap
- Bootstrap is a special tool for one who does not like to work with CSS.
- It is developed by Twitter.
- It is a framework that helps us to create a responsive website with few lines of code.
- Its extensive & responsive grid layout helps us to position the components of our website.
- No need for explicit coding. We can use its pre-built coding.
- Since it is lightweight, the loading time of our website is not increasing.
- It is free & open-source.
Sketch
- The sketch is useful for creating images like logos.
- This helps us to add animations & interactive elements to our website.
- It can be used to manage the texts & fonts used on our website.
- It has the ability to convert the wireframes to UI elements which can be used on our website very easily.
- It has the following features:
- Vector Editing
- Non – Destructive Editing
- Code Exports
- Pixel – Perfect Precision
- Prototyping
Visual Studio Code
- This is one of the most essential web development tools.
- It is developed by Microsoft.
- It supports the features such as Smart Coding Completion, Syntax Highlighting, Easy Deployment & Built-in Debugger.
- It supports a wide variety of languages such as JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js.
- It also supports languages such as Java, PHP, Python & C++ through extensions.
- The multi-platform accessibility makes the VSCode universal.
- It has an inbuilt PowerShell.
- By using the plugins, we can code in any language.
- It is extremely customizable and it has a built-in debugger.
- It is a high-level python framework for backend development.
- Since it has a good boilerplate code to create the server of a website, the developer can concentrate more on the logic for various operations.
- It is free & open source.
- Since it has a very good developer community and great documentation, you can seek help from experienced developers if you are stuck somewhere.
Postman
- APIs are very important because a website needs to communicate with the server or third-party websites.
- To test the functionality of any API, we need to use postman.
- Around 20 million developers are currently using postman worldwide.
- The interesting fact is that it has a very beginner-friendly UI.
- By using postman, one can create, send, save and verify the REST requests.
- Not only REST requests but also SOAP and GraphQL requests can also be created and verified using postman.
- A workspace consisting of multiple people can be created with the postman.
- The variable values can be set, retrieve & clear using scripts in the postman sandbox.
Notepad++
- It has a very simple UI and is only available on Windows OS.
- This tool can support over 80 programming languages.
- It is like a text editor and it has features such as code folding, code highlighting & syntax handling.
- This is written in c++.
- We can use this as a replacement for Notepad.
SourceTree
- It is a GUI useful for visualizing Git Repository.
- As the no. of branches & merge requests increases, the complexity of handling also increases. But SourceTree is helping to reduce the complexity of handling Git operations and thus the efficiency of the development process improves.
- The Visual Branching Diagram in SourceTree can track the team’s progress.
- You can use it on both Windows and Mac OS.
Yarn
- It has the same functionality as NPM and using Yarn one can download and use a framework in their website.
- The features of this package manager are that it is stable and has a very good speed for downloading other packages.
- The packages can be installed from the local cache.
- Since Yarncan download packages parallelly unlike NPM, it is faster than NPM.
XAMPP
- XAMPP is for PHP developers.
- XAMPP comes with Perl, PHP & MariaDB.
- It has a lot of features to create highly customizable websites.
- It supports Windows, Linux & Mac OS.
- It is lightweight hence the developers can manage the database easily and is for full-stack developers.