Web Development Essentials – Tools (Part 1)
In this part of the series on Web Development, I will be outlining some of the tools that can assist you in the development of your project. IDEs are often considered to be the biggest aspect of the toolchain that you will end up using, but they often get unfair weight put on them. You will probably end up writing your code the same way no matter which IDE you use, the advantages coming from productivity and its features relating to debuging and project management. Its those little apps you use which often cause you tear your hair out, and where a big improvement can be made without vast changes to your development platform of choice.
MySQL GUI Tools
The first feature in this series is the set of tools MySQL make available for their database system. MySQL is often chosen as the DB platform for websites now, and you will probably find that in most shared or virtual hosting situations, MySQL will be there by default as the provided database backend. It also plays nicely on all platforms, and has a freely available community version.
I know that many PHP developers resort to using PHPMyAdmin to administer their databases hosted on a MySQL platform, but it really is not the best tool available for the job – especially if you’re not a PHP developer, and don’t feel like setting it up on your local testing server just so you can use PMA. Well, fear not!
The MySQL GUI Tools are a set of free GUI-based tools (I kid you not) that cover 3 essential aspects of managing a MySQL database: the Administrator, the Query Browser and the Migration Toolkit.
Administrator
MySQL Administrator running on Windows XP
This is the Administrator, and it is very useful for managing such things as your users and their permissions, server settings (such as logging, locale and startup settings) along with a pretty useful backup and restore feature. It can also help you view your server logs: useful for debugging broken or slow SQL queries.
Query Browser
The other really good tool available in the package is the Query Browser – this is so useful I couldn’t live without it at the moment! With it, you can create and edit tables, run scripts and queries along with edit the actual data in your DB. All this is kept within a pretty simple interface, uncluttered from the extraneous noise you find in a lot of commercial applications which perform this task. I really can’t stress how useful this tool is – it even has quickly-accessible help on commands and other aspects of your queries, ensuring you can always get the job done quickly. It beats PHPMyAdmin any day of the week!
Other tools
Finally, the final tool is the Migration Toolkit, intended to assist those having to migrate from older databases. Another app available on the MySQL website is the MySQL Workbench, which is a kind of data modelling program, enabling you to visualise the design of your database’s tables, fields and schemas. This is pretty useful if you have an overly complex DB which is hard to think of logically at times, and is also a great help if you need to synchronise databases on a production server with the latest updates to the testing server due to its migration tools built-in.
You can get all these great tools for free for Windows, Linux and Mac OS here:
MySQL GUI Tools – http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/
MySQL Workbench – http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/
This is a follow-on from ‘Web Development Essentials – Frameworks‘ and is part of a series of articles on Web Development as it stands today.
Geoff Adams
Programmer, Research and Development
