Why does a software developer make software? Definitely, to make day-to-day life simple, easy and effective. This can also give them high popularity.
Nowadays, the software development industry is in huge demand, ultimately resulting in high competition. You have to focus on smart work instead of going through a laborious journey.
There are already more than 21 million software developers in the entire IT industry, and you have to stand out steadily. Instead of focusing on learning and examining new programming languages, learn about effective tools that help to increase your productivity.
As per the survey conducted by Shanhong Liu, 85% of the software developers use source code collaboration tools such as GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket as the most widely used tools of 2023.
In this article, we are going to look into the list of the top 5 Best Software Development Tools that have proven to be most effective in 2022. Here, we are also going to discuss the reasons to use the particular tools and guide you on the steps to work with them easily.
What are the factors you should consider while selecting the Tools:
Before moving to the list of the top 5 best software development tools, let us have a look into the factors you should consider while selecting such tools.
There are several platforms like code editors, code sharing platforms, communication platforms, continuous integration, Linux, and cloud services. They need tools to create, edit, support, and debug other applications as well as manage frameworks and programs.
For that, you should consider certain factors while selecting the related development tool that is based on the type of your project.
A few major factors include:
1. Standards of Company:
Standards of any software development agency define the rules and procedures for developing software through its protocol or documents. Such documents represent the working strategies, growth, and success stories of the company. This helps the companies to gain worldwide recognition.
Modern software development standards include project management methods such as Scrum and Kanban. Specifically, when it comes to programming, DevOps is a set of best practices that ensures the final product meets a threshold of speed, performance, reliability, and usability. Today, the best companies in the business have adopted DevOps to such an extent that it is a culture more than a process.
2. Usefulness Of Tools
Tools are meant to ease the work of development. The development industry intends to use the tools to accomplish the industrial process. With the help of these tools, you can achieve more productive outcomes. Furthermore, it also helps to investigate the errors in documentation and rectify them wisely.
3. Appropriate environment
The process of collecting the software and hardware tools to build software systems is termed a software development environment (SDE). Each environment has different stages and a unique purpose. While preparing the software, you probably want your user to look at its bright side rather than glancing at the messy process you held in your project.
Here, the development team uses the environment to create stages of the application consisting of the procedure of production. Through the right software development environment, you can ensure full functionality for business-critical applications.
These must be in tune with evolving technology instead of legacy software methodologies. For instance, cloud native computing is the flavor of the day in the enterprise. This will soon trickle down to SMBs too. So developers need to get used to building and deploying cloud native applications over extensive public, private or hybrid cloud systems.
But lastly, the purposes and policies depend on the organization to dictate when and how such an environment is used.
Now, let us dive directly into the list of the top 5 best software development tools.
Top 5 Best Software Development Tools
1. Atom
In the list of best software development tools, Atom is the most recommendable code editor of 2021. It was developed in 2014 and released by GitHub.
The crucial feature that attracts every developer is :
- It is a free and open-source code editor.
- Developers can fully customize the appearance and requirements to speed up productivity.
The source code editor is selected as per the requirements of the project. It is mainly preferred among macOS, Linux, and Windows users.
Why use Atom?
An atom consists of several fine features that allow the developers to use it effectively even without ever considering a config file.
It gives you more opportunities to customize the appearance and facilitates you with quick and easy installed customized themes. You will get eight syntax themes already loaded in your installed version. Furthermore, it provides four UI i.e. two light and two dark. You can also create your own personalized themes.
Atom provides you with several more benefits to improve the efficiency of your workflow.
- Create interactive and responsive web applications.
- It offers an automatic code indentation.
- Makes your code more readable with customizable color schemes.
- It helps you to catch coding errors by providing a wide selection of third-party plugins.
- Atom enables you to view your project’s file and folder structure in a tree view.
How to Use Atoms?
The first step to using the Atom Text Editor is downloading and installing.
You can simply click on Download and get a free copy of Atom for Mac, Windows, or Linux.
You may face a bit of difficulty if you’re running OS X Version 10.8 or later. By clicking ‘download for Mac,’ the Atom .zip file should appear in your downloads list. If not, you may receive an error message that says your machine can’t open “Atom”.
To make it work further, drag the unzipped Atom folder into your applications folder and Right-click ‘open’. The application should open. Now, if you’re running Windows 7 or later, you can simply visit the same page and download the current version of Atom. It will appear in a download folder as a .zip file. Then double click and follow the steps in the Window installer to make it work.
2. Gleek
Gleek is a text-to-diagram data modeling tool. It offers three plans: Free, Premium, and Team Plan. It helps developers to create required diagrams from adequate descriptions.
A developer can easily generate informal, sequence, class, or entity-relationship diagrams, as per convenience with the help of their keyboard.
Why use Gleek?
Diagrams are the most effective yet major time-consuming way to represent ideas. Gleek enables you to prepare the plans and conceptualize the ideas of the project with your team members through its predesigned templates.
It offers you the following features:
- Multi-user collaboration to collaborate more users on the same account to achieve the same target.
- Drag and Drop feature to drag the required section of text and drop it to a proper position.
- Varieties of pre-designed templates to quickly create diagrams for common use.
- Create a flowchart to express the procedure step-by-step.
- The data import and export feature facilitates you to save the diagrams into a different format and can be sharable within your team members.
How to Use Gleek
The first step to initiate your work is to go to the website or simply click on Gleek to create a diagram.
You can simply go with the free account without registration and start making your desired diagram. You can select the premium plans in case you are working with team members where more features are required in your project.
Choose your desired plan and you are good to go. You can refer to the Gleek diagram maker to understand how to make a professional diagram.
3. Buddy
Buddy is a CI/CD tool mainly used by the Web and software developers, digital agencies, designers, technical copywriters. It is a paid tool with a cloud plan starting price of$75.00 per feature, per month. But you can also go with a free version or try its free trial as well.
Buddy enables users to build, test, and deploy the software application through delivery pipelines. Such pipelines are created with 100 already built actions to support other deployment applications. It’s like joining the roots that are already strengthened in the ground.
Why Use Buddy?
Buddy supports a wide range of several development languages like Ruby, Angular, Python, and so on.
Buddy offers you the following services in zero investment:
- Get unlimited delivery of pipelines.
- Build a high-performance environment in your project.
- Enables an easy configuration through GUI & YAML.
- Get first-class Docker support.
- Constant deployment for GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and more.
Here, the DevOps team also uses features like Docker layer caching, concurrent pipelines, reusable environments, repository caching, and so on to build a custom application on Buddy platforms.
How to Use Buddy?
Now we will go through the basic steps on how to build and deploy a front-end application with Buddy.
Sign up with your GitHub/Bitbucket/Google account or email address at Buddy.
Now Select Git provider and repository as per the requirement of your project. Buddy supports several repositories like GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, Buddy Git Hosting, or Your Private Git Server. You can use any full-featured native hosting.
Now create a delivery pipeline by configuring the Branch you want to deploy. Set the trigger mode on manual, automatic on push, or recurrent on a time interval.
Then select the Build action as per the type of your project. Provide the build commands for the application and make sure to save the changes. In this way, it will add the actions to your pipelines.
4. AWS Cloud9 IDE
AWS Cloud9 is an integrated development environment that allows you to build, write, run, and debug your code. It offers highly effective code editing features with access to a Linux server where you can run and store the code.
Cloud9 IDE is an open-source programming tool that supports several programming languages including C, C++, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl, JavaScript with Node.js and Go. Although, it is mostly written in JavaScript and uses Node.
Why Use Cloud9 IDE?
AWS Cloud9 IDE provides you access through a web browser. It offers you the following facilities:
- Can work with code in a running Docker container.
- Provides you with online code repositories to store source code archives.
- Makes it easy to collaborate with your team.
- Configure the IDE to your preference.
- Switch the color themes as per your choice.
- Allows you to bind shortcut keys to enhance the workflow.
- Allows to clone the complete development environment
As Cloud9 IDE consists of several effective features, it is prominent to count it in the list of top 5 best software development tools in 2021. It is a full-featured editor that offers a wide range of configurations. This tool is termed a serverless development tool as it directly uses a web browser to run.
How to Use Cloud9 IDE?
Here, you can go to the website or directly click on AWS Cloud9 IDE and create an AWS account. The best part of this tool is that you have to pay only for your required services as long as you are using them. You are not compelled to register for long-term contracts or licenses.
5. Zend Studio
Zend studio is one of the well-known leading PHP editors. It allows the developers to build quality PHP web and mobile applications that are entirely based on IDE format. It offers fast coding, easy debugging, and optimum productiveness from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to PHP 7.
PHP 7 is the latest version of PHP. Zend Studio is highly designed to create apps for boosting developers’ productivity. If you are looking for the best developer tools that scale the workflow as per the DPI settings, Zend Studio is for you.
Why Use Zend Studio?
Zend Studio offers advanced features that guide developers to code intelligently and make it smooth to operate . While framing the codes, if wrong codes are inserted mistakenly, then this tool will help you to validate, investigate, and analyze them in no time.
It also offers several benefits to the users:
- Enables access to the newest scripting concepts in PHP 7.
- Integrates the advance debugging tools such as Xdebug, Zend Debugger, and Z-Ray, to enhance debugging capabilities.
- Offers a comprehensive library of rich plugins and add-ons for developers to create effective web interfaces.
- Helps to create framework-based applications that have the correct structures, systematic files, and directories.
How to Use Zend Studio?
You can either download Zend Studio on your PC or go for a free trial. It offers three plans:
- Personal Use: $89/yr
- Commercial Use: $189/yr
- PHP Developer Suite: $799/bundle
If you are looking for open-source and classroom projects, go for a free plan.
To download Zend Studio, select the family environment i.e. Windows, Linux, or Mac OS. Then choose the capacity of the platform. For instance, if you select Windows, then whether it is Windows 64-bits or Windows 32-bits. With this, the software will be able to deduct your version and you will be able to download a studio that fits on your server.
Final Words
Software development is not everyone’s cup of cake. But the tools had made it easy to save the time and efforts of the developers to build an effective project in minimal time. Here we have discussed mainly the top 5 software development tools that are best and widely used among users.
Before using any tools, clear these questions to yourself:
- What is your requirement?
- For how long do you need the tool?
If you can resolve these questions, you are good to go.
