Few Best Hand Picked IDEs & Code Editors for Web Development.

IDEs, or Integrated Development Environments, are special kinds of software solutions which are capable of providing comprehensive facilities for software developers and computer programmers. They are normally packed with a wide verity of tools which help the programmer to complete their job more easily and thus increase productivity. IDEs enable a platform to be completely customized for software development and provides the entire set of tools, from build-automation tools to team servers, under a single umbrella! They are also packed with tools for debugging, testing, and software profiling tools. IDEs have intelligent code completion and suggestion features for reducing the hassle of typing the entire set of code syntax. The syntax coloring feature helps the developer easily identify which is a keyword, which is a method/function, and which is a class or variable.

Code editors are like normal text editors, but they are deeply optimized in a way that will help developers write code more easily. Code editors come with syntax coloring and some code completion features (in some editors). A few of them are even a simplified version of a full-fledged IDE!

Now, let us go through a very short, hand picked set of intelligent IDEs, code editors, and a few UI/UX prototyping tools which are mainly optimized for web development.

For front-end development, especially for UI/UX, BootStrapStudio is a good option. It has built-in drag-and-drop features for faster UI/UX development. It also comes with built-in code editors for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. BootStrapStudio provides lots of prebuilt template components. It also comes with a server for live previewing of our design. It is capable of providing four different screen size previews, which helps the developer to optimize and make the UI more responsive. While exporting the project after development, BootStrapStudio provides lots of features, like minifying JS and CSS files.

Sketch is a good application which helps us to create UI/UX design prototypes very quickly and efficiently. It is only available on Macs.

JustInMind is another good tool for wireframing and prototyping Web Apps and Mobile Apps.

All the above-mentioned tools are premium, few are in the subscription model, and a few are available in a perpetual licensing model.

If you are looking for a free tool for UI/UX prototyping and designing, then Gravit Designer is my suggestion. It’s a very good, premium grade solution packed with a wide verity of tools and features. It’s available on all major platforms.

For backend development, choosing the IDE would be completely dependent on the technology that you are going to work with.

If you are coding it in Java, then go for NetBeans. It is open-source and completely free. NetBeans comes with good auto-completion features and provides all the necessary features that a developer needs under a single roof. It comes with built-in servers (GlassFish and Apache Tomcat). NetBeans provides a good DataBase manager. It has a query editor and visual database table designer. It also provides drivers and managers for all major RDBMS systems like Oracle DB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and JavaDerby.

Eclipse is also a good option (I don’t have experience with it).

If you have enough funding, then go for ‘IntelliJ IDea Ultimate.’ It’s packed with intelligent code completion and suggestion features. IntelliJ provides so many good features which boost application performance and developer productivity. It provides good syntax highlighting features. And, using the beautiful Language Injection feature, developers will get assistance even on injected languages (JavaScript, HTML, XML, CSS, etc…) in the form of Strings inside the code!

If you are coding backend in PHP or Node.js, an IDE is not needed. Go for intelligent code editors like Atom, VSCode, or Brackets.

Brackets from Adobe is a good solution. It has a built-in tiny web server which will help us to see the live preview of our web page without the hassle of complicated configurations.

JetBrains has a wide verity of tools and IDEs that can help you develop anything from complex web apps to standalone mobile apps. All are enterprise-grade solutions have very intelligent code completion features and many other good features which will help you to developer faster and more productively. But all of them are premium and a little bit expensive (except IntelliJ IDea Community Edition).

Web DevelopmentProgrammingSoftware DevelopmentIdeTools For Design