Tools for Front-End development
Good practice for software development / coding phase.
For example my favorite combination of useful tools and processes for software coding is:
Ubuntu OS, Visual Studio Code, Git, Meld/diff , NPM, automated unit and functional tests.
The listed above software and tools are on the high end of development view.
Ubuntu OS provides stability and availability for install and usage of very wide range of software development tools.
Visual Studio Code is a modern, fast and powerful IDE for development. Provides support for highlighting of all popular nowadays programming languages. Provides ability for usage of thousands of additional tools, which could be added to your IDE as extensions.
Git is best of the best version control software today. Flexible, fast and powerful. The main advantages of Git version control are as follows:
- Git is distributed
- Git works fast with branching and merging
- Git has a staging area
- Git is used on the main and biggest software repositories in nowadays like GitHub, Bitbucket .
In this way I can easily focus my mind only on the latest changes in the stable code of large project. I prefer to do small and focused commits, in this way “holding the reins” of the project is more safety and clear.
Meld/diff is my choice for diff and merge tool from many years. It allows me to keep close eye on your current changes.
NPM makes the life easier on FrontEnd JavaScript development. It help developers to share and reuse code, and makes it easy to update the code that you’re sharing, so you can build amazing modules and libraries, easy for installation into any project JavaScript.
Automated Unit tests — writing unit tests and running them into watch mode (execution on each file change) allows you to keep very close an eye on the latest and every change in the code. This allows you to work on small chunks of functionality, you code becomes more stable. On every change you keep an eye on the entire project, not only over the reflection on the close functionality, where you make the changes in the project. For unit tests writing are available a lot of tools for every language and type of project. For example: - PHP — PHPUnit
- Java — JUnit
- JavaScript — Enzyme, Jasmine
Selenium testing
Automated Functional tests — Functional testing does not imply that you are testing only a function (method) of your module or class. Functional testing tests a slice of functionality of the whole system. My choice for functional testing tool for web projects is Selenium and Selenium IDE — very well polished by the years and the maintainers of the project of course. You can use Selenium IDE developed for Google chrome and Firefox browsers.
Zdravko Shishmanov
DEVZONE TECH Ltd. / Founder
https://www.devzonetech.com/
