Web Development Tools

Rails 1.0
Rubyonrails.org (www.rubyonrails.org)

Rails has made the Ruby language sparkle with so much intensity that even the most obstinate developers with their own favorite languages can't help but take notice and contribute to the buzz, like Joel Spolsky's, Fog Creek Software's CEO, lengthy rant in his blog about the Ruby on Rails craze sweeping the younger crowd of developers.

Some of the key reasons for this scripting language's rabid acceptance are its strict adherence to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern, its true object orientation, easy syntax, and probably the most visibly important addition of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) that take static web pages to a new level of immediate interactivity. Whatever the reasons, the allure and vitality of the framework make it difficult to escape the Rails frenzy.

—Mike Riley

Productivity Award Winners

JBoss Application Server 4.0.3
JBoss (www.jboss.com)

JBoss' Application Server (AS) is a full-stack J2EE 1.4 open-source implementation that's so stable, it scales up smoothly from developer workstations to large-scale production-intensive deployments for 24/7 data centers. J-Boss AS is built around a versatile microkernel that binds all components together, is fully configurable and customizable to fit all needs and has an architecture that accommodates custom services beyond J2EE Standards.

—David Dossot

Macromedia Studio 8
Adobe (www.macromedia.com)

Macromedia has owned the web page design space since its winning inception of Dreamweaver from both acquired and home grown code back in the dot com heyday. Now on its 8th iteration, it still dominates the web designer's domain. Studio 8 continues to buoy the Dreamweaver flagship title while delivering improvements to its complementary Flash and Fireworks graphic design products.

—Mike Riley

Zend Studio: Enterprise Edition 5.0
Zend (www.zend.com)

Need a first-class cross-platform development environment for PHP? Check out Zend Studio. Features include syntax highlighting, code and tag completion, snippets library, and a selection of prebuilt code templates. Its code-writing environment supports PHP 4 and 5, HTML, Javascript, CSS, and XML. Zend Studio also integrates with local web servers (or even set one up for you if you need one), for real-time start-stop debugging with watchlists.

—Roland Racko