14 Open Source Tools for Software Development

14 Open Source Tools for Software Development

What’s great about open source?

The members of our software development team are strong supporters of open source tools. So what’s so great about open source tools for software development?  The team tells me they like open source tools for a number of reasons:

1. They have comparable, if not more cutting edge, features to the expensive commercial tools.
2. They are free, which allows them to adopt new tools quickly while saving everyone money.
3. They can be modified as desired.

The first two points are easy to understand – who wouldn’t want great tools for free! But the key lies with number 3 since solving problems and making things more efficient is what our developers do best, being able to modify open source tools to better meet their needs would make them seriously appealing to developers.

With thousands of open source tools available to choose from and new ones constantly becoming available, we thought it would be interesting to share some of our development team members’ personal favorites at the moment.  Here are 14 open source tools to check out:

1. Eclipse – Eclipse is probably best known as a Java IDE, but it is more: it is an IDE framework, a tools framework, an open source project, a community, an eco-system, and a foundation.
2. SoapUI – SoapUI, is the world leading Open Source Functional Testing tool for API Testing. It supports multiple protocols such as SOAP, REST, HTTP, JMS, AMF and JDBC. It supports functional tests, security tests, and virtualization.
3. Notepad ++ – Notepad++ is a free source code editor which supports several programming languages running under the MS Windows environment.
4. Firebug – Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
5. Android Studio – Android Studio is an Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA. Similar to Eclipse with the ADT Plugin, Android Studio provides integrated Android developer tools for development and debugging.
6. SVN/TortoiseSVN/Visual SVN – Subversion clients to help programmers manage different versions of the source code for their programs.
7. TotalTerminal – TotalTerminal is a system-wide terminal accessible via a hot-key.
8. PuTTy – PuTTY is a free and open-source terminal emulator, serial console and network file transfer application.
9. WinSCP – WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client and FTP client for Windows. Its main function is the secure file transfer between local and remote computer.
10. Artifactory – Artifactory is the open source repository manager. Proxy/cache for Maven, Ant, Gradle, Ivy, Ruby, NuGet and more with fine-grained permission control.
11. DJ Java Decompiler – DJ Java Decompiler is Windows decompiler and disassembler for Java that reconstructs the original source code from the compiled binary CLASS files (for example Java applets).
12. Ant – Apache Ant is a Java library and command-line tool whose mission is to drive processes described in build files as targets and extension points dependent upon each other. The main known usage of Ant is the build of Java applications. Ant supplies a number of built-in tasks allowing to compile, assemble, test and run Java applications. Ant can also be used effectively to build non Java applications, for instance C or C++ applications.
13. Ivy – Apache Ivy™ is a very powerful dependency manager oriented toward Java™ dependency management, although it can be used to manage dependencies of any kind.
14. JUnit – JUnit is a simple framework to write repeatable tests. It is an instance of the xUnit architecture for unit testing frameworks.

Do you have other favorite open source software development tools not listed here? Let us know and we’ll check them out.