There is no shortage of quality open source web development tools in the industry. From content management systems to the creation of portals, web development tools find a unique place in every developer’s arsenal. Among the numerous tools, few stand tall and are used extensively in various organizations.
Popular Open Source Web Development Tools
The most popular open source web development tools are:
Drupal: Drupal is one of the most robust and widely used content management systems available in the market. It is based on PHP and can serve individual websites to large, corporate portals. Drupal is also modular in nature. The installation of Drupal requires MySQL, PHP and a web server like Apache. Drupal features big fixing and patching. Newer releases of Drupal enjoy an automatic update notifier. So, if you are looking for a tool that rapidly rolls out quality sites, Drupal is what you should be looking for.
MediaWiki: It is a scalable platform and is used for many .wikis. The backbone is PHP and MySQL. You can integrate multimedia files and YouTube extensions in MediaWiki.
Firebug: With the help of this tool, changes in CSS no longer require you to refresh a page multiple times. You can dynamically modify the HTML and use JavaScript console to work with JavaScript interactively. Firebug extensions for Firefox are widely used web development tools.
Dragonfly: It is an open source debugging tool for debugging web pages in the Opera browsers. It supports remote debugging with other Opera sessions on multiple machines.
GIMP: The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is the equivalent of Adobe Photoshop, but is free. It features photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It is compatible with many languages and platforms.
Aptana: It is a cross platform JavaScript enabled development environment for building AJAX applications. It features FTP support as well as code assist on HTML and CSS.
NVU: NVU is the open source equivalent of Dreamweaver. It features HTML/CSS editing and WYSIWYG.
Kompozer: It is a favorite with developers who are into CSS. Kompozer's rendering engine uses Gecko, the same engine used in Firefox. It features an easy-to-use CSS editor and strong WYSIWYG features. It is compatible with the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.
Quanta Plus: It is a very rich, open source web development environment and is popular with PHP enthusiasts. As it is based on KDE, it appeals to many in the Linux community. It lets you work with multiple pages at once and has a very complete PHP debugging tool built in.
Fiddler: Fiddler is an HTTP debugging proxy that keeps a log of all HTTP traffic between your computer and the internet.
JsUnit: JsUnit is a Unit Testing framework for client side JavaScript. It is the port of JUnit to JavaScript. It includes a platform for automating the test execution cycle in multiple browsers and multiple platforms.