IDE, or integrated development environment, is a special software solution that can provide comprehensive facilities for software developers and computer programmers. They often contain a variety of tools that can help programmers get their work done more easily, thereby increasing productivity.
IDE can completely customize a platform for software development, and provide a complete set of tools from building automation tools to team servers under one umbrella! They also contain tools for debugging, testing, and software analysis tools. The IDE has intelligent code completion and suggestion functions, which can reduce the trouble of typing the complete code syntax. The syntax coloring function can help developers easily identify which are keywords, which are methods/functions, and which are classes or variables.
Code editors are like normal text editors, but they are deeply optimized to help developers write code more easily. The code editor has syntax coloring and some code completion functions (in some editors). Some of them are even simplified versions of mature IDEs!
Now, let's introduce a very short selection of intelligent IDEs, code editors, and some UI/UX prototyping tools that are mainly optimized for Web development.
For front-end development, especially UI/UX, BootStrapStudio is a good choice. It has a built-in drag and drop function to speed up UI/UX development. It also comes with a built-in code editor for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. BootStrapStudio provides a large number of pre built template components. It also has a server for real-time preview of our design. It can provide four different screen size previews, which can help developers optimize and make the UI more responsive. When exporting a project after development, BootStrapStudio provides many functions, such as shrinking JS and CSS files.
Sketch is a good application that can help us quickly and effectively create UI/UX design prototypes. It is only available on the Mac.
JustInMind is another good tool for wireframing and prototyping web and mobile applications.
All of the above tools are advanced tools, with few subscription models and some permanent licensing models.
If you are looking for free tools for UI/UX prototyping and design, Gravit Designer is my suggestion. This is a very good quality solution with a lot of tools and functions. It is available on all major platforms.
For back-end development, the choice of IDE will depend entirely on the technology you will use.
If you use Java for coding, select NetBeans. It is open source and completely free. NetBeans has good auto completion function and provides all necessary functions required by developers under a single roof. It comes with built-in servers (GlassFish and Apache Tomcat). NetBeans provides a good database manager. It has a query editor and a visual database table designer. It also provides drivers and managers for all major RDBMS systems, such as Oracle DB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and JavaDerby.
If you have enough funds, please select "IntelliJ IDea Ultimate". It includes intelligent code completion and suggestion functions. IntelliJ provides many good features that can improve application performance and developer productivity. It provides good syntax highlighting. Moreover, with the beautiful language injection function, developers can even get the help of injected languages (JavaScript, HTML, XML, CSS, etc.) in the form of strings in the code!
If you use PHP or Node.js to write back-end code, you do not need an IDE. Select an intelligent code editor, such as Atom, VSCode, or Brackets.
Adobe's brackets are a good solution. It has a built-in micro network server, which can help us view the real-time preview of web pages without complicated configuration.
JetBrains has a wide range of tools and IDEs that can help you develop anything from complex web applications to standalone mobile applications. All are enterprise level solutions with very intelligent code completion function and many other good functions, which can help you develop faster and more efficiently, but they are high quality and a little expensive (except IntelliJ IDea Community Edition).
