Posts tagged Web Dev

Continuing on from my last post, today we’re going to cover some of the different applications which you can install on your USB drive to create a web development kit. There are a number of different applications which you can install and run from a USB drive and the best place to find most of them is at PortableApps.com.

The particular applications we are interested in for creating the web development kit are:

1. XAMPP – A package installer of Apache, MySQL, PHP and some useful tools (such as PhpMyAdmin and the XAMPP control panel)
2. Notepad++ Portable – an excellent text editor with syntax highlighting
3. Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition – a portable version of the popular web browser
4. Filezilla Portable / WinSCP – FTP clients (yes, you have a choice!)

This set of applications should be enough to get any developer off the ground and coding away. However, there are a number of other portable applications which can add even more value to your USB web development kit such as:

1. PuTTY Portable – A portable version of the popular telnet and SSH client
2. NVU / Kompozer – A WYSIWYG editor, useful for those developers who don’t live their lives in text editors
3. GIMP Portable – The popular image manipulation program and a handy tool to have when web programming
4. 7-zip/ PeaZip portable – File archivers and compressors
5. WinMerge Portable – A file comparison and merging tool
6. Toucan Portable – A backup utility (not really a web programming tool, but I’ve lost many lines off good code in the past due to a failure to keep regular backups… Learn from my mistake!)

There are a heap more applications of all types onPortableApps.com but as they are not relevant to the web development toolkit we’re creating I won’t be covering them in this article.

Ok, now we’ve got the software tools we need for our USB web development kit. In the next installment, I’ll take you through a bit about the hardware requirements and how to install and configure your apps.