More and more, open source projects are either integrating with the web or are developed entirely for on-demand use. This requires strong web development skills--or at least good enough tools to rescue you if any of your web development skills are weak. The good news is that there are many free open source tools to help you with your web project, and given the costs of web development environments and the like, they can save you a lot of money. Here are more than five good examples.
Most web development environments cater especially to developers who favor certain languages and environments. Kompozer, seen at left, is a huge favorite with developers who are into CSS (cascading style sheets). Kompozer's rendering engine uses Gecko, the same layout engine in Mozilla's Firefox. It stands out for its very easy-to-use CSS editor, and strong WYSIWYG features. You also don't have to be very experienced with HTML or other web development langauges to use Kompozer. Windows, Mac and Linux users can get going with it.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization--you're probably very familiar with it, but there are many new, free tools to help you bring traffic to your web site that you may not know about. I'm a big fan of the list of 10 of these from Not Your Average Geeks. You'll find free, graphical tools from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, among others.
Piwik, at left, is open source web analytics software, and I've written once before about it--highly recommended. When it comes to doing web analytics, it's beneficial to get as many views of your data as possible, so you can use Piwik in conjunction with a tool like Google Analytics or on its own.
Piwik's features are built inside plug-ins, and a community of developers contributes interesting plug-ins. It also has a very customizable interface where you can drag and drop the types of widgets you would like to keep an eye on regarding site metrics.
Quanta Plus is a very rich, open source web development environment, especially popular with those who concentrate on PHP for building sites and applications. It's based on KDE, so it appeals to those in the Linux community most. It does a good job of letting you work with multiple pages at once, and has very complete PHP debugging.
I'm always surprised by how few people doing advertising-driven things on the web don't know about OpenX, a free, open source ad server that serves more than 30,000 customers. OpenX recently secured $15.5 million in second round funding, and stands out for its flexibility. You can use it as a hosted service or you can download it if you want to run it on your own servers, keeping your ad revenue and information in-house. OpenX is ideal for small- to medium-size publishers who may not meet the hefty thresholds for traffic that can be required for big ad revenue dollars through other ad servers.
With OpenX you can deliver ads from multiple advertisers and ad networks, give high priority to higher value ad campaigns, increase overall click-through rates by limiting how often visitors see a campaign, and integrate the service with most popular existing databases.
Finally, many web-based projects are now including video. There are also a lot of good open source tools for creating, editing and working with it. Check out my list of favorites and the many excellent, free tools cited in the reader comments. I happen to work with web-based video intensively, and I was surprised by what the readers came up with there in the comments, including the incredible MediaCoder, and MPEG Streamclip.
Do you know of any good open source tools for web development and growing traffic?
Comments
Add CommentBy Tanvir on May. 06, 2008
Need to expand community and share all of things.
By rod on May. 06, 2008
cool web developer tools
By Satanamir on May. 06, 2008
Describe MOre! :)
By Jeremy on May. 07, 2008
Open source software is getting better, but why not use more advanced/better/easier to use free non-open source software?
http://www.microsoft.com/express/vwd/
If you want to get the web dev job done as quickly as possible and you use Windows, why not use their new free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express software?
By Jose_X on May. 07, 2008
>> If you want to get the web dev job done as quickly as possible and you use Windows, why not use their new free ...
I confess. I don't use Windows. And here is why I don't use Monopolyware.
Using Monopolyware ties you to the Monopolist's gameplan against you. The Monopolist refuses to implement open protocols faithfully in their products. For every bit they yield, darkness lurks behind. Plus, it's their system, not yours. Your clean files change from under your nose at their will. Actually, there aren't too many clean files on their systems. Layers of spider web clog the system at all levels. Their lies and disingenuous courting make me puke (figuratively) but are necessary.. kind of like the sugar coating required to make cyanide go down.. or rather like the sugar capsule surrounding the little robotic porcupine hors d'oeuvres they offer. Once you take the bite and swallow, it's tough going back.
It's about time they went after Adobe's jugular since a key part of their strategy for success has been to use their leverage to keep desired products off other platforms like Linux. Of course, Adobe took long to start taking Linux seriously, but we'll see.
As a closed source Monopolist, these are simply the actions that make business sense to their stockholders, so I don't blame the Monopolist execs and employees any more than I blame them taking up their jobs in the first place.
It's good to see that the Monopolist knows how to learn from open source. It's sad that they keep your titts and their tats and are so deceptive and greedy (hint, avoid mono and giving your copyrights over to Novell).
It's very good that even while showing all our cards and sticking to protocols that are open by definition (with all implementation bugs viewable as open code), and the Monopolist keeping all their cards to themselves, that we will still kick their hineys.
:-)
By Joel on May. 07, 2008
Wow, Jose_X, could you be any more ignorant?
How could you possibly pretend that your comments were at all constructive to the current discussion?
Your remarks do not offer any supporting or dissenting views on the software mentioned in the very post you partially quoted prior to your response. Go troll somewhere else, please.
I, for one, am a daily MS Visual Studio (205/2008) user. I also use DreamWeaver on a regular basis. VS 2008 has made MANY improvements upon design capabilities, including CSS class integration into the page designer. I used to do the majority of my site design within DreamWeaver since the design tools have always been much better and more feature-rich than Visual Studio. I used to just leave the heavy coding to the Visual Studio environment. Not any more! Visual Studio 2008 fills in enough design gaps to allow me to skip using DreamWeaver altogether for dynamic sites.
I think Visual Web Developer 2008 Express is a wonderful tool that is free for all to use without licensing limitations. It is solid and includes support for many different languages. I especially like the new Intellisense for javascript feature!
By Dave Lane on May. 08, 2008
Sorry Jeremy and Joel,
I completely agree with Jose_x. Microsoft technologies are generally heavily (often misleadingly) marketed mediocrity. Moreover, if you use them, they always guide you farther into MS's grasp by helping you build systems which only run on Windows or otherwise deny the existence of standards. And that's seldom to a developer or customer's benefit.
As for MS's tools being advanced/better/easier, I think you'll find that's a pretty difficult assertion to back up. Moreover, open source tools typically improve at least an order of magnitude faster. Microsoft are soiling their briefs contemplating how quickly Linux distros like Ubuntu have well and truly surpassed all the "innovations" contained in their latest flagship, Vista, which only took 5 years to produce and is still half baked. In that time, Ubuntu released 7 major versions, starting in October 2004...
Personally, I only think people promote MS technologies if the a) don't know any better, or b) are making money from selling Microsoft stuff. Open source is where things are going. MS know that too, but haven't had the heart to tell the marketing guys yet.
Dave
Joel, I'm intrigued that you're calling Jose_x ignorant. And accusing him of being destructive. Pretty ironic, eh.
Are you a professional web developer? And you use Dreamweaver or Visual Studio as your primary tools? All I can say is we wouldn't hire someone who listed those as their tools of choice.
Dave
By Joel on May. 08, 2008
dangerdave, I primarily meant that Jose_X was ignorant in his conspiracy theory assertions about Microsoft's evil and diabolical plans to slit the throat of those not wanting to use their products. Also, I did not say his views were destructive, merely lacking the constructive nature of contributing to the topic of the post. He also did not give any specific reasons as to why, in his own experience, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express is not a useful development application. There is nothing about Visual Studio that keeps someone from creating non-microsoft technology web sites.
By the way, dangerdave, in order to stay on the topic of "More Than Five Top, Free Tools for Web Developers", since you do not like either DreamWeaver or Visual Studio, which tools do you prefer to use, or have your developers use? Anyway, based upon your statement that you would not hire someone who use these programs as your tool of choice, I cannot say that I would want to work for you anyway :)
I am a professional web developer, and since I deal with very large business systems, Microsoft technologies are the platform of choice in order to interoperate with what our clients already have and to handle their complex requirements. I do work with open source languages as well, such as PHP and Perl, but enjoy developing in Microsoft .NET better. This is due to personal preference, as well as my confidence in being able to do everything I need to do while meeting deadlines and quality requirements. Again, this is my personal opinion, so please don't flame me for having a differing point of view.
Dave Lane, I agree that many of Microsoft's products fall short of consumer expectations, as well as the quality and features offered in open source software. I am a big proponent of open source software, but that does not preclude me from being able to comfortably live in both worlds. There are many great open source tools and web applications that are in the open source community that are also built using Microsoft technologies and frameworks. For instance, I believe that, in many ways, DotNetNuke is superior to Microsoft SharePoint portal server. DotNetNuke is built in Microsoft .NET and is a very well supported (by the community) open source portal application. SharePoint is an expensive closed source portal application that Microsoft sells. I have used both extensively, and I enjoy the agility of DotNetNuke in its ability to quickly push out new versions and enhancements that otherwise take years for SharePoint to achieve. Open source development is superior in community/peer support as well, since people are working toward a common goal. And, if you want to customize it according to your needs, just download the source and have at it!
My point is, I am not a closed-source fanboy, but I firmly believe that you do not have to stay with open source programming languages and frameworks to develop good and useful open source software. Also, Microsoft .NET-based web applications do run on Linux systems just fine. Microsoft actually supports the developers who developed Mono, which is the utility that makes this happen. Despite their problems, and despite their negative image a lot of people have of them, Microsoft has done a lot of good things for the developer community, as well as the world (Gates Foundation, for example).
So no, Dave, I am not a) ignorant, or b) making money selling Microsoft stuff. I am just trying to be fair in relaying some reasons as to why I am a Microsoft developer, and why it is OK for Microsoft technologies and open source initiatives to co-exist. I hope you find me, a promoter of MS technologies, an exception to your rule :)
Joel
Hi Joel,
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I appreciate you taking the time to explain your rationale.
Regarding my preferred development environments - the best coders I know use very simple tools very very efficiently. In the web space, they use a good browser with good diagnostic tools (e.g. Firefox's Firebug extension), vim or emacs, and a terminal interface (with a means of reading debugger output). From one computer, they can work effectively on multiple machines simultaneously. With regard to APIs and syntax (that IDE's are aimed to assist with), great developers simply remember them (that is, in part, what makes them great). I'm a strong advocate of hand coding markup (and making judicious use of frameworks, Drupal being my preferred option), and using W3C validators to test standards compliance.
I find Dreamweaver and IDEs tend to lead to a platform-specific development style which mostly seems to favour MS's broken idea of web standards (witness IE6 and to a slightly lesser extent IE7. I'll believe IE8 when I see it, but I'm cautiously optimistic).
With respect to MS technologies - I'm afraid I cannot respect Microsoft as a business. As a result, I'm unimpressed by any software that doesn't run on open source platforms. MS Windows is not open source, .Net is patent encumbered, and MS's tacit approval of Mono is more of a trojan horse than a peace offering. They still hold the sword of patents over the entire project. Moreover, they can change the spec (thereby rendering Mono incompatible) at any time to suit their strategic aims. They've done so in many other contexts throughout their history. To gain my respect, they'd have to follow my suggestions.
I'm afraid, although you do seem to be a good guy (and I know quite a few nice people who work at Microsoft, but that doesn't make me like Microsoft any better, or respect their judgement for working there), you're still making money selling their technologies, and helping customers become more committed to divisive, totally proprietary technologies and products which perpetuate the lock-in (file formats, etc. - don't get me started on OOXML) which has characterised MS's practices since day one. Having some customers who have been audited by MS for license compliance, I can tell you there's nothing like that experience to convert businesses to open source.
I believe, if you think that open source offers better solutions, that the most ethical thing to do is help businesses migrate away from MS. I've been doing that with my business for nearly 10 years, and I am, in fact, hiring because we can't keep up with demand.
We don't, for the record, have a single MS Windows machine in our organisation (just one Win XP instance occasionally running under virtualisation so we can test web applications against IE6/7 - and, again, don't get me started on how much we hate those pieces of #&@*).
Regards,
Dave
Looks the target for my link above got stripped: try http://davelane.name/how-i-could-learn-to-love-microsoft
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