Software for AJAX Development

Putty is an SSH client for getting a command shell on a remote server. I use it a lot, and not just for AJAX.

MySQL is a free (for non-commercial users) database system. It has two really useful graphical management tools that I use to make, secure, and test the databases that I use on this site.

Eclipse is an open-source IDE. It supports regular languages such as c++ and java, but you can get it with the Web Tools Platform that allows HTML autocompletion along with other handy features. It looks at your page's doctype and then verifies that your document complies with the standard. If the IDE finds bugs it treats them like errors and warnings that you normally get when programming.

This is a must-have for any Ajax programmer it is much easier to find bugs in FireFox then in IE. Make sure you check the "install development tools" option when doing a custom install.

This extension adds a useful toolbar to FireFox. The toolbar allows you to make test-changes to CSS on a live site, validate webpages against a half-dozen standards, quickly turn on and off features to test sites for browsers that do not support them, view/change cookies on live sites, and perform many other useful tasks.

Lets you debug JavaScript errors. It is not the best debugger I have ever used, but it is the best JavaScript Debugger for FireFox.

This is a client-side XSLT library made by Google. I don.t usually use the XSLT part because it still has a few bugs, but you can use it to get a good XMLRequestObject on most browsers.

This JavaScript library takes the native XSLT and XMLRequestObjects on many different web-browsers and adjusts them so that you get a common set of functionality available regardless of who is viewing your page. In many cases this will be faster than Google.s solution because it uses the browsers own functionality wherever possible rather than its own.