Complete open source based web development

Today I will discuss about some open source software’s/tools which are not only good but give you the best choice to do your work if you are a startup company who is willing to get into web development work without spending much in software’s .Also If you are a individual like me who wants its place in web space you can try these tools. I will discuss all the tools required everything from setting up a server to putting your application to monitoring your application.

As we are discussing about cheapest solution I don’t want to spend anything on Operating system cost rather I can spend that in getting more advanced hardware. If you don’t want to take the hardware maintainace cost you can go for cloud based service provided by Amazon EC2 or Rack space cloud. I assume that to achieve better cost management everybody will go for Linux based server. For me I will go for red hat /fedora based server with updated kernel module.

Basically before installing any tools I assume that you have got the following setup with latest version.

• Operating System for server: Linux(Any flavor of your choice)
• Database: MySQL
• Web server: Apache/Tomcat(As per your requirement)
• Application: PHP
• Mail Transfer Agent: Send Mail/Postfix(I like postfix for easy configuration)

1. WinSCP/Bitvise Tunnelier: To access remote systems via SSH and SFTP protocol.
2. Webmin: Graphical Interface to administer linux servers through browser
3. Usermin: web-based interface for  managing your mail-server through browser
4. Subversion: an open-source, centralized version control system.
   –>Tortoise SVN: Subversion client for windows to manage subversion
5. Spam assassin: Open-Source Spam Filter for incoming/outgoing e-mail.
6. Pfsense: Linux based open source firewall
7. Google apps:Standard version is free to 50 users which can be integrated to mail server for outgoing email
8. Zimbra:Open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange server.You can also configure blackberry so stay connected all the time
9. phpMyAdmin:GUI tool to administer MySQL databases from a browser
10. Mantis: Bug tracking system with access control
11. PHPBB:Open source tool to create forum of your own
12. Word press blog:Using this we can create our own blog.It has rich support base.
13. Aptana Studio  :IDE to write programs in html,php,mysql etc and also has a strong userbase to support
14. Firebug:Its an extension to firefox in order to analyze website performance.
    1. YSlow: An extension to firebug to analyze website performance provided by yahoo
    2. Pagespeed: extension to firebug to analyze website performance provided by google
15. Open inviter:It fetches the contacts from almost all the mail providers and social networking sites
16. Nagios: It’s  a monitoring tool which can be used to check various system and network states and it can send alerts through SMS and email.