Open Source Developer Tools You Should Know About
The open source software development movement has produced a variety of versatile and robust open source developer tools. Moreover, the movement also kicked off a software development life cycle paradigm that encourages an agile and collaborative environment and corrects the pitfalls of traditional development processes. Open source developer tools help developers practice better software development and reduce the dependency on licensed software.
Popular Open Source Developer Tools
The most popular open source developer tools are:
Bluefish: It is a popular IDE available for web development purposes. While it can handle programming and markup languages, it can also help in creating dynamic and interactive websites. Bluefish is lightweight, can open multiple documents simultaneously and includes functionalities like project support, remote file support, search and replace, undo/redo, syntax highlighting and anti-aliasing in windows. Bluefish has wizards for C, Apache, DHTML and SQL.
Anjuta: This is an open source IDE for C and C++. It offers features like project management, interactive debugger and a source code editor that includes code completion and syntax highlighting. The GUI can be arranged in any way you like and you can have different layouts for every project. While you can develop your own plug-ins, you can also use Project Manager to develop and maintain your project in an external environment.
Glade: Glade is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool to create GTK+ toolkit for GNOME desktop. The Glade interface includes text boxes, dialog labels, check boxes and menus. The interface designs are stored in XML format which allows better compatibility with external tools.
t GCC is a GNU compiler that works with programming languages like C, C++, Java and FORTRAN. The installed programs are C++, cc (link to gcc), cc1, cc1plus, collect2, cpp, g++, gcc, gccbug and gcov. The installed libraries are libgcc.a, libgcc_eh.a, libgcc_s.so, libstdc++.[a,so] and libsupc++.a.
GDB: GDB is the GNU debugger. This tool is used from the command line debugger and will give you instant feedback from another program while it is being executed. GDB can halt your applications upon specified instructions, examine the trigger and make changes to the program.
Eclipse: Eclipse is an IDE written in Java and can support many languages. It has an extensive plug-in system and is one of the most widely used open source development environment. Eclipse has a huge community and an ever increasing user base.
Make: Make is a Linux utility that determines which program needs to be recompiled. Once the compile process is executed, you can execute your program. A makefile describes the relationships among the various files of your applications and combines them.