#! code

I quite often find myself needing to know how long a string is, especially when testing form validation or when trying to write a page description. I therefore like to have this little tool to help me by simply counting the number of characters in a given string.

Use the JavaScript text length tool here.

The latest versions of Zend Framework come with a handy little tool that gets you up and running with a basic Zend Framework install within a few moments. When you have downloaded Zend Framework you will notice that in minimal and full there is a directory called bin. This seems to be intended to contain lots of different tools, but at the moment it contains three files that are part of Zend Tool.

JS Bin is an online tool that allows you to test JavaScript without having to muck about with files. You can just quickly cut and paste some code in and view the output. It is even possible to make the code you are looking at public and then use this as part of an ajax call in another instance of the application.

To get you started there is a nice help section, which also includes a couple of videos.

Phing is a PHP tool that allows you to build projects. Phing stands for PHing Is Not Gnu make, which is kind of a common coder's joke. It is basically a tool that will take a set of files in multiple directories and create either a zip file or a numerous other things that you might want to do with a project.

Phing itself is a PHP program, so all that is needed to run it is a working copy of PHP. Also, because Phing is part of PEAR it is easy to install, and you don't need to install Apache to run it.

phpMyAdmin is a tool, written in PHP, that allows you to handle the administration of a MySQL database server. You could always download the MySQL GUI tools, but the problem there is that you need to give external access to a user account, which isn't always possible to do. This is where phpMyAdmin steps in.

Regular expressions are a very useful tool for any programmer wanting to validate input, format strings, change words, reformat data or even split apart a string into an array. However, when you are starting out, writing them it can be hard going, they are not very easy to learn and the only way to really understand them is to practice, practice, practice.