Tools

Fonant now develops under Fedora Linux, having had his Windows 10 PC fail to reboot after an update. Current development tools include:

  • PhpStorm - an excellent replacement to Zend Studio, cheaper and more effective!
  • Git – Source code control systems to record and control software version changes (hardly any SVN these days).
  • Vivaldi - the natural successor to Opera.
  • Thunderbird - for email until M3 arrives in Vivaldi.

When developing under Microsoft Windows, Fonant used various tools to develop websites, including:

  • Zend Studio – Integrated development environment for PHP, including debugging and profiling, based on Eclipse.
  • Subversion (SVN) and Git – Source code control systems to record and control software version changes
  • Adobe Photoshop – The industry-standard image manipulation application
  • PuTTY – Cross-platform SSH client, installed on WinXP and Nokia 9300 mobile phone for remote server access
  • FTP Voyager – Windows FTP client with directory synchronisation facilities
  • Charles Web Debugging Proxy – Investigate web communications in great detail, test for slow connections, and more!

Fonant used to use these web browsers:

  • Opera – Main browser, fast and standards-compliant, including RSS reader and the best email client there is.
  • Firefox – Secondary browser.
  • Chrome – Secondary browser.
  • Internet Explorer 9 – IE is slowly becoming more standards-compliant, and thus easier to support!

Fonant tests sites in these web browsers:

  • Internet Explorer 8 – quite a few people still use this old browser, it's the last IE that you can run on Windows XP.
  • Internet Explorer 6 – many people still use this ancient browser, but it's so broken it's very difficult to support.
  • Safari – Apple’s browser, now also available to run under Microsoft Windows. Performs very similarly to Chrome, as it's based on the same layout engine.
  • Internet Explorer 7 – a few people still use this old browser.

Old versions of Internet Explorer are tested using full installations in a Windows Virtual machine, so that they behave exactly as they should do.

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