9 Types of Essential Tools for Every Web Developer

The Web is growing exponentially and getting more and more complex. That's why web developers need the right tools to help with their jobs. In this article, we've put together the most useful and popular tools that help a lot with web development. Most of them are used by our awesome devs here at Umbler and our super cool fans in the Umbler community.

We hope these tools make your job easier and, if you're a beginner, they help you get started right.

Quoting an example: "If you are developing a CBD company website what do you need to do to attract the people. What techniques & Java Programming you can use to make it perfect for your audience. So It is very important to understand the nature of site first & then work accordingly.

1. IDEs and Text Editors

IDEs (Integrated Development Environment or Integrated Development Environment) save you time switching between different applications and help you keep your focus on your code. An IDE usually includes –

• A text editor that edits source code

• A compiler

• A debugger

• A GUI (Graphical User Interface) builder

As much as IDEs offer much more than a simple text editor, they take up space and are not for beginners. If your need is something simple, a tool to just write your code quickly, it's better to choose a text editor, So what should you use? The answer does not have a right answer. There isn't an IDE or a text editor that's right for everyone. The best tool, in my opinion, is something that works well based on your needs.

After talking to our devs here at Umbler, we've created a list of the most popular IDEs and text editors that suit them well –

• Visual Studio – Microsoft Visual Studio is a premium IDE costing between USD 699 – 2900, depending on edition and licensing, but it also has the option of Visual Studio Community – the free version for students and solo developers. There are several editions of Visual Studio that are capable of creating all kinds of programs – from web applications to mobile applications. It is a flexible tool and supports a wide variety of languages. Guilherme Raduenz, who is part of our community, has this insight for you “As for Visual Studio, it's free for individual developers and small teams. Only large and small teams with high incomes need to pay license. It's a very powerful IDE, but it doesn't like computers without SSD.”

• Visual Studio Code (VS Code)
Visual Studio Code is a lightweight yet powerful editor with a well
thought-out interface that works on your desktop and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It supports JavaScript, TypeScript, and Node.js and has a rich ecosystem of extensions for other languages ​​(such as C++, C#, Python, PHP) and runtimes. VS Code is ideal if you need a lightweight editor that doesn't use a lot of space and resources.

• Atom
Atom is a modern, affordable but ‘hackable to the core’ text editor, which
means you can customize everything to do anything, without touching your
settings files by hand. It is a desktop application built with HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and Node integration. It runs on Electron, a framework for building cross-platform applications using web technologies. It has extensive package and package managers (such as plugins, syntax definitions, menus, snippets, etc.) written in CoffeeScript.

• Sublime
Sublime is a sophisticated text editor for code, markup, and text with great
performance. It is especially useful for individual files because it runs
faster than VS Code. It offers a high level of customization, almost never
fails, and includes cool plugins and packages like Origami and GitGutter that make development really fun.

• Netbeans
NetBeans is one of the best open-source (open source code) PHP IDE. It is
feature-rich and free and supports multiple languages ​​such as English,
Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Simplified Chinese. The latest
version of Netbeans (version 8.2) is lighter, faster, and supports everything
regarding PHP. It supports popular PHP frameworks like Zend, Doctrine, Smarty, and Symfony2 and also supports Laravel through laravel-ide-helper and other frameworks like Yii, CakePHP, FuelPHP, and WordPress CMS.

• Cloud9
Cloud 9 is the most used and most famous cloud IDE for all programming
languages. If you use PHP then Cloud9 is even better for you because it offers a built-in debugger for real-time code inspection

There are some minimum requirements for using an IDE, such as:

1. A machine with two cores of 2 GHz or more

2. 4GB RAM and 20GB of HD left (if you want to use Visual Studio, note that it uses more than 10GB of HD)

2. Front-end Frameworks:

Front-end Frameworks or “CSS frameworks” are packages with pre-written and standardized code in files and folders. They provide a foundation to build on and still allow flexibility with the final design. They help increase your productivity without sacrificing the quality of your work.

A typical front-end framework contains the following components

• A grid layout to organize your website design elements

• Predefined font styles and scaling that vary based on their function (eg different typography for headings and paragraphs)

•Out-of-the-box site components such as side panels, buttons, and navigation bars

We recommend that you choose a CSS framework that saves your time writing code and helps you add extra components (such as buttons) with ease.

The most popular CSS frameworks are –

• Bootstrap
The most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework, Bootstrap facilitates the
development of responsive websites and mobile projects on the web. It is open-source, hosted on GitHub, and is perfect for beginners as it is the easiest framework to learn and use.

• Foundation
A framework that offers a lot of flexibility and customization, Foundation is
ideal if you're a front-end development veteran looking for a framework that's super flexible. Like Bootstrap, Foundation is also free and open source. Made by the folks at ZURB (a product design company), it has many resources to support your development cycle.

•Materialize

Materialize is based on Google's Material Design to make it easy
to build responsive and elegant-looking web applications. It is an HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework that has features to simplify the development of responsive pages that leverage Google's Material Design design philosophies. Material Design combines the classic principles of successful design, together with innovation and technology. If your need is to create an application that is visually interesting (in terms of UI) and with little effort, opt for Materialize.

If your need is to create an application that is visually interesting (in terms of UI) and with little effort, opt for Materialize. Want to know more about this subject? So it's worth taking advantage of this site with really cool guides, courses, and resources about Materialize.

3. Web App Frameworks

Web app frameworks simplify your development life and exist to improve and facilitate the process of building a website. They typically provide tools that cover the most common CRUD cases (Create, Read, Update, Delete or Create, Read, Update, Delete). There are many web frameworks available.

Let's explore a few:

• ASP.NET
A free and fully supported web app framework that helps you create
standards-based web solutions. It will create websites based on HTML5, CSS, & JavaScript as well. At Umbler, our web dev gurus rely on .NET to make their jobs easier. And if you think that only Windows users can work with ASP.NET, be aware that Microsoft has released ASP.NET CORE. .NET Core is a fast, lightweight platform for building applications and web services that run on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Unlike the .NET framework that works only on Windows, .NET Core is open source and cross-platform, that you can create .NET Core applications that run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

• Ruby on Rails

If you are a Ruby fan, then Ruby on Rails is the framework for you.
It's free, open-source and offers good JS integration, which is perfect for
AJAX heavy sites. It also includes the Prototype Java script Library that you
can directly integrate. If you are new to Rails, then check out this Ruby on
Rails tutorial for beginners to learn more.

• Django

Django is a high-level Python web framework that facilitates rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. It provides a self-generated website administration section for its (website) users to create, edit and update content. It also includes tools for caching data and building flexible URLs. If you use Python, then check out this extremely useful blog on Python programming.

• Laravel

The most famous PHP framework, Laravel is simple and very easy to use. It also offers greater compatibility and faster development than any other PHP framework. According to Heber, one of our software engineers, “I particularly like Laravel because it's simple, it has everything you need to develop a robust application, including important functionality from other frameworks like database migrations. All this without too many configurations.”

• Phalcon

If your main concern is speed and performance, then choose Phalcon, the fastest PHP framework. Need an expert opinion? Check out what Heber had to say about Phalcon, “I really liked the framework syntax, and there's Phalcon micro, which is super simple; a light version."

4. Command Line Terminal

According to Cassio Bock, our Dev (Full-stack), Learning how
to use the command line greatly increases the productivity of a dev, many
simple tasks can be done through it, without the need to use a mouse. Also,
many tools have applications that run from the command line, so the dev will need to know how to use the command line one way or another, but the sooner the better.”

The most basic tool (for Windows users only) is CMD (Command Line Prompt) – the Windows command processor. Our experts recommend using powerful tools like Powershell (for Windows), Bash (for Linux) and Terminal (for Mac). It is important to learn how to use them because tools like Git, MongoDB, MySQL, among others “force” you to use the command line.

5. Code Versioner

A very important step for any developer is to learn how to use a code versioner, which will basically help to keep the history of development evolution, keep the source code in a safe place to avoid losses, besides being essential when working in a team. There are several versioners, such as Team Foundation Server (TFS), Git, SVN, among others, in addition to SaaS products such as Visual Studio Online, GitHub, and BitBucket. But here in our post we only included Git. Let's see why.

Git

Don't wait until you accidentally overwrite your essential files. Avoid this by using Git, an open-source version control and source code management system. It tracks your project history in one repository and makes it easy to maintain multiple backup repositories. But why use Git, why not something like TFS? Thiago Roberto, one of our software engineers explains, “When using the versioner a good IDE will also make a difference, offering easy shortcuts to upload and get the latest version of the code, as well as a good interface for merging versions. For those working with C# it was almost certain to choose TFS as a versioner due to the great integration with Visual Studio, however, it demands a very heavy installation of a set of software, in addition to licensing costs. Because of this, and with the possibility of integrating with Git from version 2013, my choice, but which I believe is the market in general, became Git. It offers the same features as TFS, but has some differences, such as: being open-source and free, commits can be done locally before being uploaded to the server, and in my case it proved to be faster than TFS during the day-to-day use to add a new file, get and upload the latest version of the files, which makes it a perfect choice.”

6. Web Deploy

Writing the code to build app apps is one thing, but deploying an app and making it work seamlessly for your audience is another thing entirely. That's why we've included some web deploy tools that will really reduce your deployment headaches.

• Filezilla

If you are a beginner, just getting started with web development, you can use a simple FTP like Filezilla to publish your resources. It is a very simple file exchange FTP tool, which can be useful for deploying websites.

• Git – FTP

Doesn't have all the resources needed to deploy and efficiently control web
applications. So you should use a tool like Git and build your deploy process with it. Git makes version control easy – you'll always be able to track every change, and deploy across multiple environments.

• Jenkins

Jenkins is a deployment automation (CI – Continuous Integration) tool written in Java. If you have all your code on one machine and publish using FTP, then it wouldn't be worth using Jenkins. But if you keep it in a repository and test it out, it would be worth using a CI like Jenkins. So you can automate all this part, besides making the deployment process much more fluid. Another advantage is security. According to our Thiago Roberto,

Want to understand more about how a CI deploy works? Then check out this post about continuous application deployment using SNAP CI.

7. Other Technologies

In addition, there are several other tools and technologies that make life a lot easier for a web developer. We've listed it all in this category of other technologies:

• Postman

Postman is like a Swiss army knife for web services devs. It is a very powerful HTTP client that you can test web services built under the REST model mostly, but it works for the web in general. Postman is a Chrome App that stands out for having a great sharing feature between users. Our Software Developer Marcos Artigas recommended Postman,

“Having a good tool to consume HTTPs APIS is indispensable for a good dev. Postman is super simple compared to other ways of performing the same actions.” It has a low learning curve which means you'll be building and testing your web services quickly.

• NewRelic

Knowing exactly what's going on with your website or application in production is very valuable in today's world. Devs know the local host world is wonderful, we have plenty of information there for debugging code and optimizing scripts, we can have full control over what's going on. However, when putting an application into a production environment, we often lose control of things. Therefore, Marcos also recommended using Newrelic. NewRelic becomes a complete tool compared to other competitors, mainly because it has integration with several languages ​​(PHP, .NET, Node.Js, Java). Capturing the complete stacktrace of errors that occur in production, discovering slow queries that are hampering the performance of the site or application, monitoring and even generating statistical reports becomes a simpler task for Dev.”

• Chrome Dev Tools

Are you a fan of our arts, and our dear Umblerito? So you would
certainly love to know what is the tip of the creator (the 'father') of Umblerito, Tiago Fontella. Editing of the easings of the transitions:

the New color picker or New timeline dashboard to analyze performance bottlenecks:

On The focus for debugging on other devices.

• AngularJS

AngularJS is an open-source framework maintained mainly by Google and uses the concept of SPA (Single Page Application). In this type of application, only part of it changes and the other remains fixed, being part of a template sharing between pages. It has tools to fetch data, process it, display it on the screen, and handle user input (such as clicks or keystrokes) in an intelligent way. It simplifies development by providing a reliable MVC (Model View Controller) style framework. It's great for building SPAs that don't need a lot of DOM manipulations (applications that don't involve games and GUI editors). A tip is to use Angular2 as it is a more powerful version.

• Vue.js

Vue.JS is a JavaScript library for developing reactive components for modern
web interfaces. Developing components that are reactive involves looking at a javascript object and reflecting your changes to the HTML DOM. Doing this using pure javascript or jQuery is not easy. VueJS makes this extremely simple. According to Vinicius Reis who wrote this really cool post about VueJS, "The learning curve is one of the shortest. To start using VueJS just import a script via CDN, without the support of the Telegram, Slack and StackOverflow community.”

Want to learn more about Vue.js? Check out our post on The Stars of JavaScript and how Vue.js was the most popular project in 2016.

• ReactJS

Developed by Facebook, ReactJS is a very strong competitor of AngularJS. It can build large-scale applications that involve lots of DOM manipulations. That's because unlike AngularJS (version 1), ReactJS provides something like
‘’Virtual-server side-DOM’, along with the client-side DOM. The presence of two DOMs results in greater efficiency and capacity for complex DOM manipulations. The Facebook and Instagram sites were built using ReactJS.

• Node.js

Node.js is a platform built on Google Chrome's JavaScript engine to easily
build fast and scalable network applications. It uses an IO model called the
‘event-driven non-blocking IO model’ and has an extremely fast JavaScript
engine from Google, the V8 engine. We normally use JavaScript as the browser language. Node.js helps to use JavaScript on the server-side. Many web tools (web tools or task runners) like Bower, Grunt, Gulp, etc use Node.js. You can also build complete applications just using Node.js.

Fontella

our main Front-end Designer, also uses Node for their work, “Node plays a key role in my front-end workflow. I use many packages that automate tasks such as:

Updating dependencies, minification, and concatenation of assets and scripts, a compilation of styles with preprocessors, setting up local servers in seconds and with live update, etc.”

• Studio 3T

(formerly MongoChef) If you're thinking of entering the 'big data' level
database realm, you've probably already thought about MongoDB and realized that it's a little more complicated than your database usual. But there is a GUI that really makes using MongoDB easier. It's Studio3T (previously known as MongoChef). It fully supports MongoDB shell integration and offers all the features to help you master your enterprise-level databases. Installing and using Studio3T is super easy. You can add databases, users, collections, and more without entering the MongoDB shell.

8. Web Development Communities

Every web developer has faced this. When you will face a problem, what will you do? You search Google to find a quick answer. The web offers so much content right at your fingertips that it makes it easier to diagnose and resolve issues when they arise. That's exactly why there are many communities for developers to teach, learn and grow. Check out some good web development communities –

• Github

Github is the largest community for web and app developers to share code and projects. He is also a community that helps to increase your knowledge and level. In addition, GitHub offers hundreds of ready-made code projects that you can use as a springboard for your development projects.

• Stackoverflow

Stackoverflow is a community of devs, code gurus, and web design
enthusiasts who are there to help each other with the problems that can occur within the website creation process. You can submit your questions or search for answers within the community. According to Luiz Duarte, technology evangelist at Umbler.

• Youtube

Videos are incredible sources of new information and in-depth knowledge.
YouTube channels are a very popular way to bring this knowledge to everyone. Traditionally, cooking and fashion vlogs were the most famous on Youtube. But today we can find Youtube channels offering useful information on any subject, even web development. Some really useful Youtube channels that you can follow are:

Dev Tips:
lots of tips on website creation, web design, coding, and programming.

Learn Code Academy: lots of tutorial playlists and tool roundups mainly focused on JQuery, JavaScript, and Node.js.

Level Up Tuts Most versatile tips on web development and website design topics.

Tutorials Uriel Ricardo, our Sysadmin has this tip for you,

“Tutorials are all good; Not to mention learning platforms that are free and focused on development; like this one – Sololearn. In addition to having high-quality, interactive content, they have the same mobile stuff. Usually, when I was in technical and support and studying, I didn't have time to study a language. With these development apps, my life changed. They are fast, easy, and interactive. It's not those 700-page books you need to carry around.” Also, there are more tutorials and free development courses on Tuts+, Codeacademy, etc.

9. Coffee + Spotify = Productivity?

No matter who you are, there are probably days when you could use a tiny bit of extra help to be more productive throughout your entire day. If you're like us here at Umbler, then coffee and Spotify are your life force at work and the key to your 24*7 awesomeness.

So keep drinking the sacred coffee of every day to give that energy and enjoy listening to Umblerito playlist specially created for devs – Songs to program.

Conclusion

Now it is your turn. What is the indispensable tool for you when it comes to web development? Also, is there something that is your favorite that isn't on our list? Send your answers to us in the comments and share your knowledge with our community.