Enterprise open source Toolkit

Ten top Linux and open-source developer tools

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Jack Wallen Tech Republic

Published: 01 May 2009 13:23 BST

Ten top Linux and open-source developer tools

Linux may be a great development environment, but you still need the right tools to exploit it to the full, says Jack Wallen.

Without sound development tools, you will not be able to capitalise on the best qualities of Linux. Fortunately, there is no shortage of Linux and open-source development tools. But if you are a new user, you might not know which utilities to choose, so here are 10 outstanding tools that will help take your development to another level.

1. Bluefish
Bluefish is one of the most popular integrated development environments (IDE) available for web work. It can handle programming and markup languages, but it focuses on creating dynamic and interactive websites. Like many Linux applications, Bluefish is fast and lightweight, using between about 30 and 40 percent of the resources consumed by similar applications.

Bluefish can open multiple documents simultaneously: up to 3,500 documents, if needed. It includes project support; remote file support; search and replace, including regular expressions; unlimited undo-redo; customisable syntax highlighting for many languages; anti-aliased text in windows; and multiple encodings support.

One of Bluefish's best features is the Quickbar, a user-defined toolbar that allows you to add buttons by right-clicking and choosing Add To Quickbar. You can add any HTML toolbar buttons to the Quickbar.

Bluefish has a number of simple tools to help you add various elements to your code. Need a DHTML auto-submit select box? Easy. Choose Auto-submit Select Box from the DHTML dropdown and fill out the necessary items to add the element to your code. Bluefish has wizards for C, Apache, DHTML, DocBook, HTML, PHP+HTML and SQL. If you develop your sites by hand, you should certainly be using Bluefish.

2. Anjuta
Anjuta is a free, open-source IDE for the C and C++ languages. It is powerful and easy to install by using, for example, the command urpmi anjuta in Mandriva. Anjuta offers features such as project management, application wizards, an interactive debugger and a powerful source-code editor — along with source browsing, code completion and syntax highlighting.

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Anjuta has a flexible user interface that allows you to drag and drop the tools in the layout to arrange the user interface in almost any way you like. Plus each user-configured layout is persistent for the project, so you can have different layouts for every project you have going.

Anjuta also enjoys a powerful plug-in system that allows you to decide which plug-ins are active and which are not for each project. And, like all open-source projects, you can develop your own plug-ins for Anjuta.

One of the most powerful tools in the Anjuta application is the project manager. Not only can it open almost any automake/autoconf-based project, it does not add any Anjuta-based information, so your project can also be maintained and developed outside Anjuta.

3. Glade
Glade is a rapid application development, or RAD, tool used to create GTK+ toolkit and for the Gnome desktop. Its interface is similar to that of The Gimp and can be customised and even embedded into Anjuta.

Glade includes a number of interface building blocks, such as text boxes, dialogue labels, numeric entries, check boxes and menus, to speed up the development of interfaces. Interface designs are stored in XML format, which allows them to be easily interfaced with external tools.

Installing Glade is simple. For instance, when in Fedora, you can issue the command yum install glade3. Glade does not have as powerful a project manager as Anjuta, but you can create, edit and save projects with Glade.

4. GCC
GCC is a GNU compiler that works for C, C++, Objective C, Fortran, Java and Ada. It is a command-line tool, but is very powerful. Many IDEs have tools that are merely front-ends for GCC, which is a set of tools. The most used are the compilers for C and C++ code.

How does one tool compile for different languages? Simple: for C, you invoke the gcc command and for C++, you invoke the g++ command — two compilers in the same toolkit. And g++ is a compiler, not just a preprocessor.

It will build object code from source code without using an intermediary to first build C code from C++ source. This technique creates better object code and gives you better debugging information.

5. Kdevelop
Kdevelop was created in 1998 to be an easy-to-use IDE for the K Desktop Environment (KDE) desktop. Kdevelop is now released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) and is free to use.

It is plug-in based, so you can add and remove plugs to create the exact feature-set you need. Kdevelop also includes profile support so that various sets of plug-ins can be associated with specific projects.

Kdevelop supports 15 programming languages, each having language-specific features. It also offers a debugger, a version control system called Subversion, application wizard, documentation viewer, code snippets, Doxygen integration, RAD tools, Ctags support, code reformatting, QuickOpen support and dockable windows and toolbars.

One of the best things about Kdevelop is that it removes many low-level tasks from the hands of users. Having to deal with make, automake and configure...