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Top Ten New Development Tools of June 2017

    Craig Buckler
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    Top Ten New Development Tools of the Month

    You can never have enough tools. There’s always a better way to achieve the same result, no matter how slick your development process becomes!

    Welcome to a new, regular series of articles that list the top ten new development tools of the month, as collated by StackShare. StackShare uses a combination of community feedback from discussions, favorites, up-votes, and stacks (tool collections) to determine the popularity of each new tool.

    Looking for more on development tools or resources for learning development? Check out these great links:

    The top ten new development tools for June 2017 are …

    1. osquery – OS SQL Query Tool

    At number #1 is osquery – a new tool from Facebook which exposes your Windows, macOS or Linux operating system as a relational database. You can use SQL queries to examine running processes, view installed software, discover hardware events and more.

    The following example returns a list of attached USB hardware devices:

    select * from usb_devices;

    It’s an unusual idea. It could be used by web developers to monitor performance or security breaches regardless of where an application is hosted or their experience of that platform.

    2. Standup – Progress Reporting Service

    Standup processes your project data from services including GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, Jira and Trello to create development team progress reports in a single view. The online service is free to use, easy to understand, and could streamline your daily stand-up meetings.

    3. Draft – Container Development Tool

    Draft is an experimental tool which helps developers build applications that run on Kubernetes containers. It’s currently available on Linux and macOS, with Windows builds coming soon.

    4. Heroku CI – Continuous Integration Tool

    A tool which runs your tests in a disposable Heroku app every time you push your application to GitHub. There’s no need to wait for a free Continuous Integration worker, so the tests run immediately.

    5. Warp – Terminal Sharing Tool

    Warp is a new Go-based tool which, once you type warp open, will share your Linux or macOS terminal with other users. It doesn’t require SSH access, so everyone can see the commands you enter and you can grant write access to anyone. It sounds ideal for anyone offering developer or hosting support.

    6. Istio – Manage Microservices

    Istio is an open platform which provides a consistent way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data on Google, IBM and Lyft platforms. It features load balancing, routing failover, rate limits, logging, service-to-service authentication and more. One for the serious professionals among you!

    7. Javalin – Java REST Library

    Javalin provides a simple REST API library for Java and Kotlin (a statically typed programming language which targets the Java Virtual Machine, Android, JavaScript or Native OS platforms). Javalin started as a fork of the Spark micro framework but was rewritten following influences from the Node.js Express and koa frameworks.

    A simple “Hello World” API example in Java:

    import io.javalin.Javalin;

public class HelloWorld {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    Javalin app = Javalin.create().port(7000);
    app.get("/", ctx -> ctx.result("Hello World"));
  }
}

    8. Mavo – Development Framework

    Mavo is a new, open-source web application development tool developed by Lea Verou. Mavo is not a typical library or framework. It extends HTML to add functionality such as calculations and storage without the need to write JavaScript code. The syntax is straight-forward, and I suspect it will appeal to non-developers or those requiring a little page functionality or prototypes.

    A simple example which displays the value of an HTML range slider:

    <p>Slider value: [strength]%</p>
<input type="range" property="strength" title="[strength]%" />

    The minified and gzipped modern-browser version weighs in at just 36kB for the JavaScript and 4kB for the CSS.

    9. Bootsnap – Ruby Booting Tool

    Ruby isn’t known for blistering speed, but this new tool from Shopify could help. Bootsnap is a library which plugs into a number of Ruby methods and caches the result of time-consuming operations. It’s available as a gem for Linux and macOS, and could help reduce your application’s start-up times during development.

    10. FSQL – OS SQL Query Tool

    FSQL is our second SQL-emulating tool of the month. It’s a Go application which allows you to search for files with a matching name, size, mode or date (not content, unfortunately).

    For example, find the name and size of all JSON files in the current directory hierarchy but ignore the node_modules sub-directory:

    fsql "SELECT name, size FROM ., -node_modules WHERE name LIKE %.json"

    Are you hungry for more tools? Sign-up for the StackShare newsletter to receive a list of the hottest new open source and SaaS tools every week.

    Have you developed or discovered a new tool which has revolutionized your development processes this month?