25 Best Open Source Web Development Tools

25 Best Open Source Web Development Tools

Image for postPhoto by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

There is a bunch of open source web development tools available to use. Some of them are really good, some are average and rest are not worth a try. Therefore, when you are starting a new project, it is important that you choose the right platform as per your specific requirement.

To save your research time, I have written this article for startups, product companies and web developers to know the latest open source web development tools which help you build a better web application.

I took my own experience along with helpful guidance from web development experts, users of such tools, and carried out in-depth research to come up with this comprehensive list. Hence, let?s see what are they-

25 best Open source web development tools:

1. Angular JS

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AngularJS is a renowned JavaScript framework, which is used to build dynamic web applications. It is more suitable for a one-page web application.

With the support of HTML attributes, this framework support filters, and data-binding. AngularJS has support for DOM handling, form validation, and forms.

The framework was originally developed by Google and open sourced under the MIT licenses. The initial release of this framework was in 2009, and it was created by Brat Tech LLC, the community, and Google.

2. Node JS

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Node.JS, a JavaScript runtime, was developed on Google Chrome?s V8 JavaScript engine. This runtime environment is open source cross-platform and used for the development of server-side web applications.

It utilizes an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model making it much faster and more efficient. The original author of Node.JS is Ryan Dahl, and it was initially released on 27, May 2009.

3.Brackets

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Brackets is a famous open source code editor for CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. It was written HTML, CSS, and Javascript itself and created by Adobe.

It makes the development process faster due to supporting a live preview of the browser of the editor itself. Its initial release was on 4, November 2014.

4. ReactJS

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ReactJS is a famous open source, efficient, and declarative JavaScript library used for the designing of user interfaces. It has a data binding feature, which adds more to its popularity as a JavaScript library.

It was written by Jordan Walke (software engineer) and created by Facebook, maintained by Facebook?s product infrastructure and Instagram?s user interface teams.

5.Bootstrap

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Bootstrap is an open source and free tool famous for fast development of responsive designs. It has its own classes and grids, forms, buttons, containers, navigation, JavaScript extensions, and media queries.

This tool is the most starred project on GitHub, with above 91,000 stars and over 38,000 forks.

6. Atom

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This time, Atom is one of the most famous text editors. It is called ?A hackable text editor for the 21st century? by its developers. It is open source and supports cross-platform editing.

It is with the support of a built-in package manager, AngularJS support, smart auto-completion, Jshint, Atom TypeScript, and turbo-JavaScript, which will play a crucial role in faster web development.

7. XAMPP

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XAMPP is a cross-platform and open source tool, which makes it an ideal choice of web developers. It is the acronym of X-Cross Platform, Apache, PHP, MariaDB, and Perl.

It used MYSQL formerly rather than MariaDB. This tool is a full package of these libraries, which is why the developer doesn?t need to be worried about installing and configuring PHP, Apache, and MariaDB.

It is the easiest way to establish a local web server.

8. Notepad ++

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Notepad ++ is a famous open source text and source code editor for Microsoft Windows. It is known for offering tabbed editing, syntax highlighting and code folding for above 50 programming, scripting and markup languages.

It has large community support and plugins. Notepad ++ supports macro recording and playback, PCRE (Pell Compatible Regular Expression) Search/Replace, and Bookmark too.

9. Firebug

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Firebug is one of the most famous and favorite tools of web developers. This tool is an extension of Mozilla Firefox making simpler debugging, editing, and monitoring HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on a live web page.

This tool was created by Joe Hewitt in 2006. The main features of this tool are:

  • Tweaks CSS to perfection
  • Inspects and edits HTML
  • Visualizes CSS metrics
  • Debugs and profiles JavaScript
  • Monitors network activity
  • Quickly finds errors
  • Executes JavaScript on the fly
  • Explores the DOM
  • Handles cookies
  • Has logging for JavaScript

10. Ember JS

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Ember.JS is a renowned open source JavaScript framework. This framework was created by Yehuda Katz and released in December 2011. It is based on the model-view-controller pattern.

It is one of the most preferred JavaScript frameworks for a single-page web application.

11. WampServer

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WAMP is an acronym, and its full form is Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. it is a variation of LAMP for windows systems and mostly installed as a software bundle (MySQL, Apache, and PHP).

It is mostly used for web development and internal testing, however, it can be used to serve live websites too.

12. phpMyAdmin

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phpMyAdmin is an open source and free administration tool for MariaDB and MySQL. Due to being a portable web application written main in PHP, it is regarded as one of the most famous MySQL administration tools, particularly for web hosting solutions.

13. FileZilla

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FileZilla is a famous cross-platform FTP application and free software.

Client binaries are available for Linux, Windows, and macOS, and server Binaries are for Windows only.

Both client and server support FTP and FTPS (FTP over SSL/TLS), while the client can connect to SFTP server too.

14. jEdit

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jEdit is a well-known free software text editor provided under the GNU General Public Licence Version 2.0. It can run on any operating system having Java support, like Linux, BSD, Windows, and macOS, and it is written in Java.

15. YSlow

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YSlow is a famous tool used for the analysis of your page lets you know why it?s slow. By running the tool and implementing its checklist-style suggestions, you will be able to lessen the page loading times and improve the user experience. And, YSlow tool is open source and free.

16. Sajax

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Sajax is an acronym, and its full form is Simple Ajax Toolkit. It is an open source framework built to make the development of Ajax applications faster.

It supports main server-side technologies like Cold Fusion, ASP, Perl, PHP, Ruby, and Python. It has a large community of more than 39,000 registered user on their forums.

So, if you have issues while creating a Sajax-based application, or if you want to present your work, you will be assured to have an audience.

17. CSSTidy

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CSSTidy, an open source application, fixes, parses and optimizes CSS code to lessen the size of the file and standardize CSS code formatting automatically.

This open source application also finds out and removes unwanted properties and styles. It is possible for you to adjust CSSTidy?s setting as per your favorite compression level but even the default setting can extend you 30% compression as per the creators of CSSTidy.

18. Bower

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Bower is a famous, open source package manager for web applications. When we develop a website, we are required to install a heap of packages, which Bower assists in automatically fetching and installing.

The prime purpose of Bower is not to minimize code, in fact, it is to install the right version of the packages and their dependencies necessary for a project.

19. MongoDB

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MongoDB, written in C++, is an open source and free database. It turns out as a document-oriented database storing documents in a collection.

This database is a famous NoSQL database, and it uses JSON-like documents. Due to being an open format and schema-less database, it is suitable for object-oriented programming.

MongoDB was created by 10gen in 2007.

20. Gulp.JS

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Gulp is a robust, open source, and extensible JavaScript automation library, which picks code rather than configuration. This library is a streaming build tool built on Node.js.

It is utilized to automate Web development workflows, for instance, CSS pre-processors, bundling, testing, compilation, optimization, and the like.

21. GitLab

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GitLab is a web-based repository manager, and it’s being open source adds more to its popularity. It offers features like access controls, code reviews, activity feeds, and wikis, and issue tracking.

It has continuous integration and deployment built in, which is very helpful for you for building, testing, and deploying code. GitLab was originally created by GitLab Inc and was written by Dmitry Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov.

22. Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets (SASS)

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Sass, a famous CSS pre-processor, assists in writing reusable, maintainable, and extensible code. It has features including variables, mixins, and nesting of selectors, expressions, and functions.

When using Sass, it becomes easier to make large and complex style sheets that can easily be understood and maintained. This open-source style sheet language was created by Hampton Catlin.

23. LESS

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LESS is a CSS pre-processor, that?s why it has a syntax which is like CSS. LESS supports many features capable of making your web development faster.

It offers features which allow mixins, variables, functions and some other techniques that make possible for you to make CSS more themeable, maintainable, and extendable. It was created by Alexis Sellier.

24. Axiis

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Axiis has been found to be one of the best open source data visualization frameworks, designed for both beginners and proficient and expert developers.

It allows developers to define their data visualizations through intuitive and concise markup. Axiis also offers pre-built visualization components with the abstract layout patterns that provide classes that help you develop your own unique visualizations.

Designed in a granular framework, Axiis allows developers to mix and match factors that built on complex output by compositing together basic building blocks.

25. HumbleFinance

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HumbleFinance has attained immense popularity as an HTML5 data visualization tool that looks similar to the Flash chart in Google Finance.

Furthermore, this tool is helpful in using the Prototype and Flotr libraries with showing financial data by any two 2-D data sets sharing an axis.

The data needs to be saved in JavaScript variables and three parameters are required to be set before accessing any function to create the chart.

A part of the data can also be chosen and zoon to that part; because it is a useful function when working with huge datasets.

Summary

Here, 25 best Open source web development tools were discussed with an overview of each one of them to give you a clear idea of them.

Having known the best web development tools, you should not go to get a website developed without seeking consultation from an expert in the top web app development tools.

Web application development tools provided in this blog are a very important factor to determine the quality and success of your website.

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