Tools we use in Development Process

There are many situations in programming and testing where we can use these tools to get our work done faster and effectively.

1) Firebug Download
Very interesting tool. Can not live without it if you really have to do Javascript and CSS testing. Not only that it also helps in request tracking and cookie management.

2) FireCookie download
Another interesting Firefox addon for cookie management. You can change the cookie on the fly and add a new cookie whenever required. Very use full if your site is using cookie intensively.

3) YSlow Download
Add on to firefox, very use full if you have to asses the performance of your site. specially recommendation and site score by Yslow is using full to improve the overall performance of the site.

4) Web Developer Download
Add on to firefox. You can do a ton of things from debugging javascript to changing and testing CSS, HTML on the fly with web developer tools. Have to have a tool for HTML developers.

5) HTTP Watch Download
Very use full tool for both IE and firefox for inspecting http traffic on site. Very use full to debug some performance issues. Can watch AJAX request and response and debug it. You can also use the Net tab in firebug for the same purpose though. But sometimes I feel the Net tab doesn't work, HTTP Watch is more reliable.

6) Fiddler Download
Debugging traffic and web issue in IE is really difficult. Fiddler is one of those tools that can help to watch the traffic on site easily.

7) Samurai Thread dump analyzer Download
Very use full tool to analyze the thread dump. If your site is having performance issues (100% CPU usage). You can use this tool to analyze all the waiting threads. You can take thread dump using command kill -3 <pid>

8) JadEclipse Download JAD Executable Download
Use the full tool to decompile class files in eclipse. After installing JAD eclipse, go to windows -> preferences -> Jad Eclipse -> and set Path to decompiler as C:\JAD\jad.exe <Wherever you have installed jad.exe> and Directory as temp file as D:\TEMP. for jad eclipse to work.

9) Jmeter Download
Very use full tool to do load testing. Since this tool is free you can easily do load testing on your site whenever you want. Also, this tool is very easy to set up and configure.

10) HTML Parser Download
Another Use full free java API to parse HTML. Documentation of this API is not good though with some inspection you will find this API very interesting and easy to use.

11) Regular Expression check Link
If you are using regular expression a lot, this web site will help you to create and test your regular expression. I use this link quite often to test my regex expressions.

12) Key Notes Download
Well, This is not any tool as such but very use full to keep your notes.

13) Java Code analyzer tool Download Download for eclipse
It is a very use full tool to analyze Java code performance. There are plugins available for many IDE. The tool also tells you if you have any code issue in your code (Null pointer exception and all). Very use full to develop a quality code.

14) Message Post tool (Wget) Download
Wget is a very handy massage POST tool and can be used to POST XML across applications.

15) Visual VM (Java Profiling tool) Download
Very nice and neat free Java profiling tool. For enterprise applications, I will even recommend YourKit Download. But for quick and free memory issue problems you can use this tool effectively. You should have Java 6.0 for this to run.

16) Any Edit plugin for eclipse Download
If the JSP pages contain a lot of white spaces or tabs, it may take more time to load the page and requires more network bandwidth. Any Edit is a nice tool to remove unnecessary spaces from the page.

17) Heap Dump Analyzer (MAT) Download
Sometimes your application suffers from memory issues, for example out of memory error. And you don't have any idea what is going on. There are many different reasons for out of memory error but most common is a memory leak. Eclipse Memory Analyzer (MAT) is a power full to tool to analyze heap dump and narrow down the problem. Please note that you should have -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError parameter set to collect heap dump. Java 1.6 also comes with a tool called jmap (memory map) to force a heap dump. More information can be found here.