Technology Consultant

Craig has been on the DPCI team since 2001, and in that time he has participated in building content management applications for some of DPCI's key customers. Most recently, Craig has been on the core Drupal development team, implementing Drupal solutions for DPCI customers.

A graduate of University of Michigan, Craig heads up DPCI's west coast offices. His blog is focused on business and technical topics in content technologies.

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March 10, 2008

My Development Toolbox

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For fast and easy Web development, a suitable environment is necessary. Although there are various types of tools out there (free or licensed), developers may have difficulty finding a suitable "toolbox."

While working at DPCI, I have collected a set of tools to make my Web project development faster and easier. All of the tools in my toolbox are free, and users can download them from the official Web sites of the specific tools.

My toolbox includes:

Eclipse IDE for PHP - Eclipse is an open source Integrated Development Environment (IDE) tool designed to enhance software development (http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/index.php). It is extendable with add-on features and comes with many configuration options that can be set to your preferences. For example, Eclipse offers code highlighting that highlights syntax of a specific programming language, which makes the code easy to read. Another helpful feature is code hinting, which is an auto code completion capability that makes the code easy to write. Eclipse also recognizes most programming languages and can therefore be used to edit many different file types. Workflow collaboration becomes more efficient with plug-ins for Concurrent Versions System (CVS), Subversion (SVN), and File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Debugging errors becomes more efficient with another feature that automatically shows the syntax error of the code.

Firefox and Firefox plug-ins- Firefox is one of the primary browsers that I use to test my Web applications. It allows users to install extra functionality into the browser through plug-ins (addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox). There are many plug-ins available for Web developers to perform debugging and testing right from the browser. The Web developer tool bar and Firebug comprise a set of great tools that can be used to find out information about a Web page. For example, you can check for broken links, check the size (width, height) of an element, and check which style has been applied to an element. These plug-ins also come with several validation tools for HTML and CSS to ensure that the page meets Web standards.

Multiple IE - This application will install several versions of the Internet Explorer browser on your machine. This is a great application if you want to test an application on multiple versions of IE on a single machine (tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE).

WAMP - This application makes it easy for developers to set up a local Web sever environment in one shot. It will install Apache Web Server, MYSQL ADMIN and PHP on a machine without any user configuration (http://www.wampserver.com/en). The whole process takes less than 5 minutes.

These tools have become an essential part of my development work.

Posted at 11:50 pm by Craig McEldowney

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