TechnocratTechnocrat’s Random Thoughts

People ask all the time what tools I use in development.  I have a pretty long list of stuff I use, but I will cut it down to the most important things I feel people would be interested in knowing.

For PHP, javascript, and HTML development I use Zend Studio.  It’s not free, but by far the best development tool out there.  I have tried all the other php development packages both free and paid and though some of them are pretty good, its hard to beat Zend Studio for me.  I recently switched from 5 to 6 for Eclipse.  When 6 first came out it was buggy as hell.  6.1 finally fixed almost everything.  Though there are still a few annoyances it’s finally at a point that I can use it and not get too pissed at it.

My FTP client is FlashFXP.  Again not a free product and thinking ahead none of my choices will be so I should just get that out of the way now.  I used to do a ton of FTP’ing in a past life (Shout to EsC and EsX brothers RIP).   If you did what I did nothing is better than FlashFXP.  So this choice is a hold over for me.  I still like its uncluttered interface and ability to do things like search and ignore files and folders.   CuteFTP and SImpleFTP just dont do it for me.

Another MUST have is a tool to examine differences in files.  For me its examDiff Pro.  It’s extremely powerful and very user friendly.  None of the other products are even close in my opinion.

My final tool is TextPad for creating and modify text files (or other text based files such as SQL).  It has a number of great features and abilities such as reg searching.

Anyways I hope you find these tools to be as helpful as I do.