Forum Moderators: phranque
Disqualified for being too obvious: e-mail, Photoshop, Excel, Apache, et al. We'll pretend they were given awards in previous years, and won't mention them unless they've seriously pushed the groove in 2007. These awards are intended for those apps that "scratch the itch".
Most of my nominations aren't new, but are still noteworthy weapons in a webmaster's arsenal for 2008.
I nominate:
FireBug
The awesome Firefox extension that exposes everything on your page. In-di-spen-si-ble. The amount of time this tool has saved the world debugging CSS problems could be measured in human lifetimes.
Pederick's Web Developer Toolbar
A staple in your FF toolbar for a few years now. Easy access to all the arcane commands that "normal" web surfers don't care about. Doesn't overlap much with Firebug; they are a good complimentary pair.
FireFox Extensions
Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar included, I nominate the entire category of Browser Extensions. This is the year that my chrome got cluttered with every conceivable data point you can imagine related to debugging and optimizing web pages. Yeah, baby!
WordPress
still the excellent blog it has been for years. Easy to install, maintain, and customize. 2007 saw the release of version 2.1, code named "Ella" with some great new features like Autosave, XML import and export, subcategories in the blogroll, and a new version of Akismet
Notepad++
Its few limitations are compensated for by its fantastic utility. Notepad++ makes my list this year because of the "XML Tools" plugin (available separately) and its handy Syntax checker, pretty print indenter, and the thing that takes the current XML Path and copies it to the clipboard (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+P)
<oXygen/>
A wicked XML and XSLT editor and debugger. Much better priced than its competitors and far better featured than the closest neighbour in its price range.
reCAPTCHA
The inventors of the original CAPTCHA came out with this benevolent, publicly-accessible version in 2007. Not only are you protecting your blog from being raped by bots, but you're teaching computers to read. Got the warm fuzzies yet?
Mootools
Is a script library really a tool? Well when it becomes as indispensible as your left hand, then yes. There are some other contenders in the JS library crowd, but Moo is easy, fast, intuitive, and slick. special mention goes to Dojo, Prototype and Jquery as strong contenders in this category
MS Visual Studio
This editor is extreme. The learning curve is a bit steep for a web virgin, but try using it for a few weeks and you'll wonder how you ever went without it. Essential for building .NET or C# compiled apps, but equally good as a vanilla text editor.
Ruby on Rails
Not new this year... but mentioned in 2007 because quite a few developers I know switched over to RoR in 2007, leaving behind their beloved LAMPs. Why would anyone switch to a newer platform, when you can build the same things using older, more stable (and comfortable) architecture? Well for one thing, people who use RoR get excited about it. Coming to the keyboard excited about the work you're about to do? That's priceless.
Lifetime Achievement Award
for excellence in protecting your digital assets...
Subversion
since 2001 this open-source code repository software has been keeping fools from erasing your work. Now you see it installed everywhere that open-source software thrives. What more can I say?
RadRails
Radrails started out the year as the premier turbo-booster for Ruby on Rails development. Point, click, zip, and you have a basic web app for accessing and updating a database in 5-15 minutes.
Radrails started (see below) as a free, open-source plugin for the free, open-source Eclipse IDE. And up through version 0.7.2 it was great!
Unfortunately RadRails was derailed. More properly, hijacked. RadRails points-out one of the things that go wrong with open-source efforts that rely too much on one person.
The major developer of RadRails was hired by a company which the proceeded to bring it under the umbrella of their commercial "Aptana Studio" web-development platform. While there's still only one version of RadRails, Aptana itself has both a free and "premium" version, and I'd expect the same to now happen with RadRails.
RadRails now requires the Aptana Studio plugin (if running in Eclipse), but the company really discourages using the plugin, preferring, instead, that you install their stand-alone verison of Aptana Studio, rather than use the plugin.
The latest version seems buggy, while up through 0.7.2 it was quite stable, but that's not the worst - it's been throughly dis-integrated with Eclipse. Aptana Studio likes to do things it's own way, not Eclipe's way. And this has leaked into RadRails. For example RadRails now has it's own project explorer. You CAN'T explore a RadRails project using the standard-issue Eclipse project explorer. (Well, not if you want to use RadRails features.)
Running on a 64-bit system is a nightmare, because Aptana Studio apparently has some dependencies on platform-specific code, and they haven't gotten around to building a 64-bit version. Nobody really knows how to run it on a 64-bit system, save for downloading the standalone Aptana Studio which ships with it's own Java VM. The old version ran just fine in a 64-bit Eclipse.
I hear NetBeans has great ROR support now, and I'll be looking into it, because RadRails is now unworkable.
From best to worst, in the span of a year.
Eclipse (Europa)
I don't know how I managed development without this tool in my arsenal. Even the CVS perspective works nice, making CVS updates a breeze (there are SubVersion add-ons too). Adobe came out with a fairly decent JS editor that can be added to the Eclipse IDE.
Windows 2003 Server Resource Kit Tools rktools.exe
And for anybody running a Windows setup for local development or testing (including Windows 2000, Windows XP Professional, or Windows Server 2003 operating systems), if you aren't using the Resource Kit you are missing out on some nice tools. It's not just for Windows 2003 server installations. You don't need to miss out on the symbolic links, grep, tail or other handy commands. Do yourself a favor and download and install this tool kit.
