Every workmen has his tools, and a web developer is no different! As company which offers web development services, we use a variety of different software packages and applications to produce top quality results. This post briefly covers which ‘tools’ we use, and how/when/why we use them.
NetBeans IDE
Web Archetype uses PHP to produce applications or complex websites for our clients. In order to code a complex application/website, a developer absolutely must have an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) which can organise all of their code and various files into a project which can be managed efficiently.
The IDE we use is called NetBeans. It is a free IDE which allows users such as ourselves to manage extremely complex projects into a well-organised folder structure. NetBeans is able to identify different web related files (PHP, JavaScript, CSS, etc) and treats them as such.
CakePHP MVC
CakePHP is a Model View Controller (MVC) framework which allows us to rapidly create basic applications and websites that are either complex, or have a large number of pages which are divided into multiple categories.
MVC frameworks allow developers to separate out various ‘concerns’ when coding, which leads to extremely efficient coding and results in a robust application/website which can easily be expanded on in the future.
WAMP (Windows Apache MySQL PHP)
Creating and managing code is extremely important in web development/design, however without a platform to execute the code, we would be unable to preview our work in real time. Having to upload changes to a webserver every few minutes would be extremely inefficient and would probably result in a website taking ten times as long to create!
For this reason, we use an application known as WAMP Server. As the name suggests, WAMP combines the Apache software, MySQL database capabilities and PHP scripting capabilities all in a friendly management console which can run on windows. WAMP is absolutely vital to us as Web Archetype because although we deploy websites onto a Linux server, we do all of our development work on a Windows platform.
phpMyAdmin
phpMyAdmin is a PHP driven web application which is used to manage one or more MySQL databases on a server. Although we do not use this for live websites/application, we do find it an easy way to manage our development databases during the design and creation processes of our projects.
Navicat MySQL
Navicat MySQL is an extremely comprehensive desktop application which allows users to manage multiple databases on multiple servers using local or remote connections. Currently we use this application to manage databases on projects which have been deployed to our Linux server and are being used by clients.
FileZilla
In order to deploy websites and application to our Linux server (or any other host providers), a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) application must be used. In our experience, FileZilla is the best FTP application we have used due to the fact that it is both simple, but has the capability for more advanced and complicated tasks.
Adobe Creative Suite
As mentioned in an earlier post, Web Archetype uses Adobe Creative Suite to produce all of the graphical aspects in our projects. The suite comprises of Adobe Illustrator which is used for vector image creation, Adobe Photoshop which is used for complex graphics and detailed images, and finally Adobe InDesign which we used to produce bespoke design documents for our clients (such as flyers or information sheets).
Browsers
Producing pages and pages of coding and graphics is all very well, but without a web browser there would be no end-result for people visiting a website. Leading browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer are the clever applications which turn our code into the wonderful interfaces and general layouts that you see across the world wide web.
At Web Archetype we understand how important it is for websites to be cross-browser compatible so that everybody can access and use a website no matter which browser they are using. That is why all of our projects are fully compliant and are thoroughly tested against all of the leading browsers!
Our final words
I think that just about covers the main software application we use here at Web Archetype, and hopefully demonstrates how we choose our tools carefully so that we are able to produce the best possible results for our clients.