Logaholic.de

Today i’d like to share my very own LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql PHP) development tool list for windows.

I don’t really care if it is Windows XP 32 or Vista 64, if the system supports all the hardware my workstation has (i.e. more than 4gb ram -> Vista 64).

Tier one tools (misc dev tools):

• Mozilla Firefox – browser
  • Firebug – developer plugin: “Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.”
    • Firephp – Firebug extension: “FirePHP enables you to log to your Firebug Console using a simple PHP method call. All data is sent via response headers and will not interfere with the content on your page. FirePHP is ideally suited for AJAX development where clean JSON and XML responses are required.”
    • Yslow – Firebug extension “performance”: “YSlow analyzes web pages and why they’re slow based on Yahoo!’s rules for high performance web sites.”
  • Selenium IDE – developer plugin “test automation”: “Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly…”
  • Firegestures – usability plugin: “A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures.”
• Scite – lightweight, extremely fast text editor, including syntax highlighting, folding, tabbed interface
• Zend Studio/Eclipse (main IDE) – full featured IDE
  • PDT – PHP Development Tools
  • Mylyn – task & planning tools, issue/bug tracker integration
  • Subversive – subversion plugin
• PuTTY – ssh/telnet tool: “PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator.”
• WinSCP – sftp/scp tool: “WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client and FTP client for Windows. Legacy SCP protocol is also supported. Its main function is safe copying of files between a local and a remote computer.”
• Total Commander – file manager, ftp tool, two file windows
• WinRAR – archiver for rar/zip/tar/gz/…
• TrueCrypt – highly secure, portable data storage: “Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux”
• TortoiseSVN – subversion client: “A Subversion client, implemented as a windows shell extension.”
• VMware Workstation – virtual machines
  • LAMP vm
    • Xdebug – debug helpers: “The Xdebug extension helps you debugging your script by providing a lot of valuable debug information.”
    • phpMyAdmin – web-based database administration: “phpMyAdmin is a free software tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the World Wide Web. phpMyAdmin supports a wide range of operations with MySQL. The most frequently used operations are supported by the user interface (managing databases, tables, fields, relations, indexes, users, permissions, etc), while you still have the ability to directly execute any SQL statement.”

Tier two tools (specific dev tools):

• Opera/Safari/Chrome – different browsers for testing
• IrfanView – image viewer for lots of formats, (batch-)converter
• MySQL Workbench 5.0 – erd/db planning tool, reverse engineering for sql create scripts, some smart wizards, database visualisation
• BareTail – tail -f for windows (realtime logfile monitoring)
• WinCachegrind/CachegrindVisualizer/KCachegrind in VM – cachegrind visualisation, inspect profiler (xdebug) output
• CloudBerry S3 Explorer – very nice Amazon S3 managing tool

Tier three tools (communication/support):

• Microsoft Outlook (if Exchange is available) – emails, calendar
• Mozilla Thunderbird – emails, calendar
  • Enigmail – OpenPGP security
• UltraVNC – remote desktop, direct connection
• TeamViewer – remote desktop through firewalls, easy and fast setup – very good for helping “not so experienced” users
• Miranda IM – lightweight IM client (icq, aim, msn, jabber, …)
• mIRC – “the” IRC client
• Skype – voice chat

Tier four tools (music/media)

• Foobar2000 – lightweight audioplayer

Windows Settings:

• fixed taskbar with quicklaunch (icons have always the same order), visible time and no “hide unused icons” stuff

Related posts:

1. Thank you Windows Home Server