Norbert Mocsnik continues the theme that Sean started ysterday and talks about some of the tools that he uses in his development work.

Most of the tools I use are cross-platform so hopefully everyone can benefit from these ideas. The basic tools needed of course are a webserver, PHP itself and some database server. If you work with OOP and heavily use external (i.e. not written by you) classes and/or you have to work on existing applications written by others and/or are not satisfied with the functionality that a text editor provides, you may need an IDE. EditPlus 2 is my preferred text editor but it's far not an IDE so I don't use it for PHP development.

When it comes to web development + browser, I say Firefox. Nothing can beat it with the Web Developer Toolbar. Versioning (such as CVS or Subversion) should be also essential for todays PHP developers. If you do server administration as well, you might need putty and/or winscp. Though I trust my brain, Freemind is a great tool for organizing all the things that are going on in my head. I found Adobe Photoshop and IrfanView to be the best image processing tools for website development.

He goes on to talk about quite a bit more as well as providing a comprehensive listing of just about every kind of tool a web developer could need (including others like: Xored Trustudio, eSVN, LeechFTP, FlashFXP, and much more).

What kind of tools do you use?

See also these other "what's under your hood" posts:

• Pixelated Dreams - Davey Shafik