Central Washington University Web Development Tools main content
We will begin the course using the traditional Windows development tool: Microsoft's Notepad. While many people prefer Notepad for its simplicity, most people would probably be better off using a more full-featured text editor.
My favorite text editor for Web development is Chami.com's HTML-Kit. This is the tool we will use most often during the interactive labs for writing XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP code. HTML-Kit includes tools for validating and cleaning up HTML and CSS code as well as automatically converting between different formats of HTML, XHTML, and XML. Perhaps the best feature of HTML-Kit is the ability to add plugins to HTML-Kit to extend its functionality.
While we will use HTML-Kit and the bsStyle Plugin for authoring Cascading Style Sheets, at home I often use Bradbury Software's TopStyle Pro for CSS. While Bradbury Software also makes available a free version available for download called TopStyle Lite, I recommend using the Pro Trial professional version as it is far superior to the free version.
JavaScript authoring will be done in HTML-Kit with the twJavaScript Plugin. The freeware program JavaScript Utility Suite and its JS Editor is occasionally useful.
Keeping with the philosophy of KISS (Keep it Simple Silly), we will use HTML-Kit for authoring PHP scripts. As you can imagine, HTML-Kit has a number of plugins to support authoring PHP scripts. To interpret the PHP under Windows XP, we will use the PHP 5.0 interpreter.
Many people will argue that PHPEdit is the best PHP Editor/IDE for Windows XP. I don't know about that, but one tool I designed for PHPEdit that I use to reformat PHP code is phpCodeBeautifier. phpCodeBeautifier works great as a standalone application.
To preprocess the Web pages with PHP, we will use the Abyss Web Server, a free, lightweight personal Web server installed on the Hebeler Lab computers.
For those of you wishing to install the CS 350 development tools on your home computer, here is a minimalist CS 350 Software Installation Guide.