Web Developer Tool List

Web Developer Tool List

•Photoshop 5.5 (our full review) - Latest version of the classic graphics program. It's a challenge for beginners, but once you've got your head around it you can do anything you like to an image.

•Dreamweaver 3 (our full review) - Latest version of the most popular professional editor. Download a 30 day trial or go for some of Macromedia's recommended plug-ins.

•1st Page 2000 - A free HTML editor including many JavaScript and Perl scripts. The interface is similar to HomeSite.

•Adobe Golive - An excellent professional editor for Macs. There's a Windows version too.

•Media Cleaner - If you want to mess about converting and compressing movies, you'll
find it hard to beat Media Cleaner Pro. It accepts most formats and works on many platforms. It's probably the Web movie industry standard software. There are lots of other downloadable goodies on the Terran site too.

•RealSystem G2 Beta Server - Streaming media from the experts. The RealSystem G2 Full Beta Server, which the company describes as open-standard, is available for evaluation.

•Shoutcast server - Broadcast streaming MP3s from your server to Winamp users around the world. Runs on Windows, Unix, Linux and other platforms.

•Flash 4 - If Macromedia gets its way, future developers won't even bother to learn HTML, because Web sites will be Flash from top to bottom. It's the Web animation standard. Here's your chance to get Flashed-up on a 30 day free trial.

•Livestage - Makes the most of the QuickTime format. Other movie formats can be incorporated within a QuickTime video.

•MovieWorks - Create QuickTime movies on a Mac. Trial software on 30 day approval.

•Analog logfile analyser - Around 25% of the world's logfiles are analysed using Analog. It's not as sophisticated as some of the other logfile programs out there, but it compensates in one very special way - it's free.

•Canoma - Take your regular photos of a building and glue them to a wireframe model. Hey Presto! A 3D graphic. The user interface is a joy.

•FreeHand - Illustration program famed and revered for its WYSIWYG output. Now in version 8. The trial is 30 day and fully functional.

•Image Optimizer - Excellent file size reduction system allows some parts of a graphic to be heavily compressed while other parts retain their detail.

•Illustrator - Major-league illustration software from Adobe. Unfortunately the tryout version doesn’t allow saves, exports or printouts.

•Topstyle - A popular CSS editor for simple creation of cross-browser style sheets.

•Actinic Catalog - Well-known eCommerce software with over 1300 licensees - and that’s just in the UK!

•WebSpeed Optimizer - A great little utility that throttles back the data transfer within your computer. Just set the controls for 56kbps and watch your site download from your hard drive to your screen at the same speed most of your visitors will receive it.

•Drumbeat 2000 - Macromedia ASP software for sophisticated database management. The eCommerce edition goes all the way to the shopfront. A JSP (JavaServer Pages) edition is also available.

•Homesite - Homesite wins coveted Web Developer's Journal Product of the Year, 1998 award with a total of five propheads. Read the review or download the trial version. You can also get the 4.5 beta here.

•Style Master 1.2 - Style Master is just the thing for anyone unfamiliar with the syntax and rules of CSS and for anyone wanting to get CSS to really rock and roll.

•WS_FTP Pro - New and Improved FTP Client. This is the one we've been waiting for!

•Transit Central and HTML Transit - Template-based automated Web publishing.

•CheckOut - Shopping cart with Java, enhanced CGI and simple browser modes, plus a variety of other eCommerce tools.

•Spirit - "Spirit can build almost any kind of GUI and deal with interactions. You can build components, vector graphics, spinners, databases, etc."

•Writing Proposals that Work - Combines instructions on Web proposal writing along with a template that the writer can use to develop the actual proposal.

•Ozzino Studio - "Let your web pages come alive with exciting animated interactive java applets. Easy to use interface and no programming required.Tons of functionality:- instant animated 3D objects from static images; rotating applets in same location; add interactivity to animated objects and animated gifs; spectacular drop-down menu bars; and much more."

•Texter - Create dazzling text animation Java applets in seconds with Ozzino's award winning Texter. Easy to use interface and no programming required.

•Calendars for the Web - "The software creates HTML Table and/or Image Map calendars. I've downloaded many competing calendar programs and I think this software is much, much better."

•Advanced Template Package - If you do CGI programming in Perl, then this is something you may have been waiting for -- using templates in Perl scripts.

•Web Hotspots 4.0 - Imagemap editors for static and animated imagemaps.

•Webber - A little known editor called Webber. It is simple to use, validates, and has an excellent help system. It is not a WYSISYG but you can type or import your text, mark and code that way.

•ECware Pro Version 4.0 - Comprehensive eCommerce solution (registration required for download).

•MODPlug Software - A different sort of program for background music and jukeboxes on Web pages.

•Paint Shop Pro - Version 6.01 of this great value for money graphics program.

•Hit List 4.0 - Features point and click DataLink for web mining.

XenoCode Browser Sandbox

Browser testing is one of the most tedious and frustrating parts of web development. What designer or programmer hasn’t screamed bloody murder at broken alignments in Internet ExplorerInternet Explorer 6? One of the difficult parts of browser testing is that no developer can have every browser type on a single computer for proper testing.

Enter XenoCode Browser Sandbox, a series of virtual applications that can run all popular browsers simultaneously. It does not even require the installation of software.

CLR Profiler -Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

CLR Profiler enables you to look at the managed heap of a process and investigate the behavior of the garbage collector. Using the various views in the tool, you can obtain useful information about the execution, allocation, and memory consumption of your application.

CLR Profiler is not a starting point for analyzing problems. Rather, it helps you identify and isolate problematic code and track down memory leaks. Using CLR Profiler, you can identify code that allocates too much memory, causes too many garbage collections, and holds on to memory for too long.

Note CLR Profiler is an intrusive tool that causes your application's performance to be significantly slower than normal (somewhere between 10 to 100 times slower). The tool is not designed for use in production environments.


Download CLR Profiler
CLR Profiler is available as an Internet download from Microsoft Download Center at http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/4/2/442d67c7-a1c1-4884-9715-803a7b485b82/clr%20profiler.exe.

Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Stats

You want to use Google Webmaster Tools and look at statistics for your website, such as its performance with GZIP and the number of bytes downloaded per day. Look at some data in Google Webmaster Tools and interpret it. Solution. Here we look at some data from Google Webmaster tools and make observations about it.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Fiddler Tool for HTTP Debugging

You want to see how can Fiddler help you solve caching problems in ASP.NET. For example, enable private caching on your ASP.NET website for performance benefits. Solution. Here we use Microsoft's Fiddler tool for debugging.


1. HTTP and Fiddler
For the example, I will examine private caching in ASP.NET. I required a private cache in ASP.NET, meaning one that only the browser would keep. Then I use Fiddler to see what happens. [Fiddler Web Debugger - A free web debugging tool - fiddlertool.com]

2. Getting started
You don't need to change any code to use Fiddler, but here I show the ASP.NET code so we can see what it does. We enable ASP.NET caching and use Fiddler to make sure it works right.

3. How can I force client-side caching?
You can't. But you can allow it. You can use HttpCachePolicy in ASP.NET to indicate to the browsers that they don't need to re-download pages every time.

4. Add client caching in ASP.NET
Here we tell browsers to cache pages in their memory. This saves network accesses, and makes everything faster. Use HttpCachePolicy in ASP.NET.

Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.Private);
Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(5));5. How can I use Fiddler?
Open it alongside Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, or Safari. Fiddler is a HTTP debugging proxy, and we use it to see HTTP connections. It is not only for ASP.NET or IIS. Similar tools are available in Firebug and Safari.

•The left side shows connections.
These connections are made. The first column shows the Result, which is 200 for HTTP success. Other codes are the famous 404, and 302.
•It uses special icons.
In the left side, blue indicates requests and green indicates downloads. You see when a page wasn't in the client-side cache.
6. Server-side caching
Servers can also cache HTML on their end, but Fiddler can't distinguish these loads. Server-cached pages will still be sent even if they haven't changed.

7. Use Fidder to check caching
You should make it so when the user clicks back, your page loads from the browser cache. Visitors click the site icon multiple times. Test this with Fiddler.

8. Use Fiddler with GZIP compression
You can use Fiddler to see how much GZIP compression would help your website. Click the radio button on the Transformer tab to count bytes.

Use HexView. You can read the raw binary in GZIP files using HexView. I used this to see the original file names in my GZIP files. This is useful for low-level server bugs.

9. Use Fiddler's ImageView
On the ImageView tab, you can see the images that are sent through HTTP. This is useful for dynamic images, such as those in ASHX handlers. [ASP.NET ASHX Handler Tutorial - dotnetperls.com]

10. Use Fiddler to examine headers
On the right side of Fiddler (which you can open by double clicking on an item in the left pane), click on Inspectors -> Headers. These are the raw HTTP headers.