Web Design and Development Tools

Today in the 21st century where internet has become the part and parcel of every individual??s life, quality web development is increasing its magnitude day by day. The quality of Web Development depends on the tools used for designing and development. This article describes in brief the tools used for designing and developing a website.

Linux Linux the most used Web server platform is now becoming a threat for Microsoft, with its increasing number of users in the operating system market. Linux has been gaining importance because of its easy availability, functionality, flexibility and stability. It is being adopted worldwide as a server platform primarily. It can act as your primary Web server, staging platform, and test area for new sites, applications, and scripts. All securely contained on your own desktop PC. Its use especially by developers as a desktop operating system is on the mount. Apache Apache is an open source web server that runs on most commonly used platforms. Apache has a modular design that provides a variety of services such as server-side scripting. It is commonly used web server to run websites on the internet. It supports the PERL and PHP languages. It is usually run on UNIX operating system versions like Linux or BSD, but it can also be run on Windows

PHP PHP is an open source server side programming language that allows web developers to create dynamic content that interacts with databases. PHP-enabled web pages are treated just like regular HTML pages and you can create and edit them the same way you normally create regular HTML pages. PHP can be written as scripts that reside on the server and may produce HTML output that downloads to the web browser. Often used with MySQL, PHP can perform the same tasks as a CGI program can do and is compatible with many different kinds of databases

Perl Practical Extraction and Reporting Language (Perl) is an open source server side programming language extensively used for web scripts and to process data passed via the Common Gateway Interface from HTML forms etc. Perl is a UNIX-based scripting language that is often used on the World Wide Web and is easily connectable to MySql database. It is an interpretive language, which makes it easy to build and test simple programs. It is widely used to write Web server programs for such tasks as automatically updating user accounts and newsgroup postings, processing removal requests, synchronizing databases and generating reports.

MySQL MySQL is a relational database management system, which means it stores data in separate tables rather than putting all the data in one big area. This adds flexibility, as well as speed. The SQL part of MySQL stands for "Structured Query Language," which is the most common language used to access databases. The MySQL database server is the most popular open source database in the world. MySQL runs on more than 20 platforms including Linux, Windows, OS/X, HP-UX, AIX, and Netware. MySQL is usually used for dynamic web applications and for embedded web applications, and has become a popular due to its speed and reliability and ease of use.

CVS The Concurrent Versions System (CVS), also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, implements a version control system: it keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, typically the implementation of a software project, and allows several (potentially widely separated) developers to collaborate. CVS uses client-server architecture: a server stores the current version(s) of the project and its history, and clients connect to the server in order to check-out a complete copy of the project, work on this copy and then later check-in their changes.

Abode Photoshop A sophisticated software program widely used for image-editing and graphics, it is quite powerful and a bit complex but can be learnt by reading the manual and then just trying different options. There are lots of shortcuts and different ways to do things, allowing you to work very fast once you learn the program thoroughly. With practice and a bit of imagination, there's no limit to the imagery you can create with Photoshop

Dream weaver A Web authoring tool developed by Macromedia that allows Web developers with a graphical interface for the creation of web pages, it is commonly referred to as an "HTML editor" because its work is to generate HTML files based on the commands executed in the page layout interface available to the user. Dream weaver 8 the latest version of dream weaver offers Enhanced design tools, stronger application development tools, tighter integration with other core Macromedia tools, improved functionality that simply allows you to get more done than its older versions.

Flash Flash is software used to create vector graphics-based animation programs with full-screen navigation interfaces, graphic illustrations, and simple interactivity in an antialiased, resizable file format that is small enough to stream across a normal modem connection. Flash animations are quick to download, are of high quality, and are browser independent (they look the same on different browsers). Flash animations also scale to fit the browser window

These are some of the web design and development tools commonly preferred and use by the web development companies worldwide

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