Software
Below is software recommended by the staff. Most of these programs are available as freeware, shareware, or expiring trials. Some of these programs, however, are commercial software, licensed by Harvard for its students; to download such programs, you may be prompted to log in. You may want to read these PDF instructions on how to use software downloaded from FAS IT.
Firebug. "Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page." Available for download as freeware for Firefox.
JavaScript Debugger. "Venkman is the code name for Mozilla's JavaScript Debugger. Venkman aims to provide a powerful JavaScript debugging environment for Mozilla based browsers." Available for download as freeware for Firefox.
Live HTTP Headers. "View HTTP headers of a page and while browsing." Available for download as freeware for Firefox.
ShowIP. "Show the IP address(es) of the current page in the status bar." Available for download as freeware for Firefox.
Web Developer. "Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools." Available for download as freeware for Firefox.
YSlow. "YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool." Available for download as freeware for Firefox.
Apache. "The Apache HTTP Server Project is a collaborative software development effort aimed at creating a robust, commercial-grade, featureful, and freely-available source code implementation of an HTTP (Web) server." Available for download as freeware for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
Firefox. "The Firefox Web Browser is the faster, more secure, and fully customizable way to surf the web." Available for download as freeware for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
Charles Web Debugging Proxy. "Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information)." Available for download as shareware for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
XAMPP. "XAMPP is a very easy to install Apache Distribution for Linux, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X. The package includes the Apache web server, MySQL, PHP, Perl, a FTP server and phpMyAdmin." Available for download as freeware for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. And, thanks to Keito, here's How to Install XAMPP.
Java. "Java allows you to play online games, chat with people around the world, calculate your mortgage interest, and view images in 3D. These applications, written in the Java programming language and access from your browse, are called 'applets.'" Available for download as freeware for Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.
Dojo Toolkit. "The Dojo Toolkit is an open-source JavaScript toolkit for building great web applications. It shortens the time between idea and implementation by providing a well conceived API and set of tools for assisting and fixing the issues experienced in everyday web development. It is lightning fast, extremely robust, and supplies a solid set of tools for DOM manipulation, Animations, Ajax, Event and keyboard normalization, Internationalization (i18n) and Accessibility (a11y)." Available for download as freeware for major browsers.
Ext JS. "Ext JS is a cross-browser JavaScript library for building rich internet applications." Available for download as freeware for major browsers.
jQuery. "jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript." Available for download as freeware for major browsers.
MooTools. "MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented JavaScript framework designed for the intermediate to advanced JavaScript developer. It allows you to write powerful, flexible, and cross-browser code with its elegant, well documented, and coherent API." Available for download as freeware for major browsers.
Prototype. "Prototype is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications." Available for download as freeware for major browsers.
script.aculo.us. "script.aculo.us provides you with easy-to-use, cross-browser user interface JavaScript libraries to make your web sites and web applications fly." Available for download as freeware for major browsers.
Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library. "The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources." Available for download as freeware for major browsers.
PHP. "PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language. Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly." Available for download as freeware for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
Xdebug. "The Xdebug extension helps you debugging your script by providing a lot of valuable debug information." Available for download as freeware for PHP.
Cyberduck. "Cyberduck is an open source FTP and SFTP (SSH Secure File Transfer) browser licenced under the GPL with an easy to use interface, integration with external editors and support for many Mac OS X system technologies such as Spotlight, Bonjour, the Keychain and AppleScript." Available for download as freeware for Mac OS.
WinSCP. "WinSCP is an open source SFTP client and FTP client for Windows. Its main function is the secure file transfer between a local and a remote computer." Available for download as freewarefor Windows.
MySQL Community Server. "MySQL, the most popular Open Source SQL database management system, is developed, distributed, and supported by MySQL AB." Available for download as freeware for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
phpMyAdmin. "phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web." Available for download as freeware for Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.
PuTTY. "PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator." Available for download as freeware for Windows.
