Tools

Review of Zend Studio for Eclipse Professional Edition 6.1

Posted by Branko Ajzele under Wordpress @ 31st DEC 2008

For the last 3 months, all of my Web development has been done in NetBeans 6.5. I got hooked on it ever since the beta version brought PHP support to it. NetBeans has several great advantages and even greater features to shadow out most of the commercial, freeware, or open source IDE solutions.

One of the best things about NetBeans is a excellent support for HTML code and added support for jQuery, Prototype, and general JavaScript. However, one thing I simply hate about NetBeans is its speed. Since most of my development is in Magento and Wordpress platforms (and Magento itself comes with more than 7000 files), this can really slow down NetBeans. So I decided to look for another solutions, if any Today I decided to download and try out the latest Zend Studio release, Zend Studio for Eclipse Professional Edition.

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CRU(EL)D: Reinventing the Wheel

Posted by Branko Ajzele under Tools @ 17th DEC 2008

Every developer knows what CRUD stands for. Its an acronym for (C)reate, (R)ead, (U)pdate, and (D)elete. Dealing with CRUD is one of the most time-consuming tasks in a Web developer’s day. Combine that with website styling process and you get at least 50-60% of the development time spent on each site, on average (at least that is my experience).

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1 PSD and 2 Web Tools for Better Web Design

Posted by Željko Prša under Tools @ 16th DEC 2008

While designing a Web project is best approached from an “Agile development” standpoint, preparing for the job should be more than pure agility—you should make sure you have some proper, time-saving tools easily accessible.

Starting a project should be considered almost as a ritual where everything is already set and ready to deploy without any excessive brain strain.

Over the years, you’ve probably amassed quite a collection of tools for text, design, layout, and framework. You’ve also probably accumulated multiple problem-solving apps and template documents. Every once in a while, I run into a set of tools that would really streamline your daily routine. Here are a few that will help cut down the clutter on your desktop.

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Harvest CO-OP review

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Tools @ 29th OCT 2008

Do you work in a larger team? When a new project comes, it can be quite hard to determine what human resources are available. It is very hard to know what each one of 30 team members has on its queue list. This simple CO-OP online tool makes availability communication issues much easier and faster. We started using it in Surgeworks couple of days ago and it was extremely helpful. Some might have a feeling like they are in online Big Brother, but it is an useful tool.

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Improve your development time

Posted by Branko Ajzele under Tools @ 14th OCT 2008

If you are developer working on a open source technologies then most likely you are using open source or some freeware tools. Since I’m a PHP developer this post will show examples in context of PHP. Developing for PHP can be quite a fun, or sometimes quite painful.

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Free Flash Graphs Tool

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Tools @ 21st SEP 2008

It is very common in the process of building custom web application that we need to produce some sort of visual reports. Those reports have to quickly display tabluar data in human more readable format - graphs. Although  there is a way to create them yourself in PHP using some image functions, you’ll have to spend a lot of time to make the chart look superb. This is where Open Flash Chart project jumps in.

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Website Launch Flowchart

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Tools @ 4th SEP 2008

Did you ever wonder what does it take to build a successful website? Bob Misita from Virante helps us visualize the process. He made a flowchart of 40 steps that need to be completed before actual website launch. Although the list is quite comprehensive, this steps really occur even in medium sized projects.

I hope this will help all of you who want to build a self-money-generation sites with the deadline of 3 weeks. Look at the flowchart, analyze it and don’t start the development until you planned at least 80% of this boxes.

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Making and breaking the grid with “960 grid system”

Posted by Tomislav Bilic under Tools @ 27th JUN 2008

There are millions of distinct designs on the web horizon. They all have more or less the styles on their own, like: 3D, cartoon, clean, dark, futuristic, geometric, grunge, minimalistic, retro, corporate, urban, vector, and many more. If we put out design diversity, most of them share the similar structure. They have header, menu, content area, sidebar or sidebars, footer, some secondary space and many more.

If you are one of those who developed HTML/CSS for every web from scratch, try to consider 960 Grid System and their demo page.

The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem.

Well, I just see it will work for me perfectly and will save me much time in the future.

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