Great Free Tools
I’ve been wanting to write quick recommendations of these two apps for a while. I use them daily, they’re free, and awesome.
Sequel Pro
I never really used GUI SQL tools until I did a stint on a .NET project where we used MSSQL Server and got to use their SQL tools. It was like an eye-opening experience for me. ”You mean… SQL tools don’t NEED to be all-suck?” There was a lot to hate about their tools, but within no time I was significantly more productive in MSSQL than I had ever been in MySQL. When I came back to Mac dev, I went on the hunt for a good MySQL tool. None really existed. There was CocoaMySQL but it was terrible, and that was about it. Then Querious went into Beta, but apparently issuing Betas that expire every 2 weeks when your beta release cycle is every 5-6 weeks isn’t a great way to say “thanks for putting up with our bug-ridden software.” OK I’m a little harsh there. Querious showed real promise, but after having the buggy beta demand I pay to keep using it for the 4th time I decided “Nope, enough of that. I don’t pay to be a beta tester.” Then Sequel Pro shows up, a fork of CocoaMySQL. It started out as mainly just a prettier UI for CocoaMySQL which was a step in the right direction, but it’s become so much more.
Some of the very nice features in Sequel Pro:
- Auto-completion of table and column names when writing a query
- When you’re looking at a table, columns that are foreign keys have an arrow button next to them. Clicking them will bring you to the table/row that that foreign key refers to.
- A back/forward table navigation history (very useful with the previous feature)
- The ability to quickly set a single WHERE constraint on your table to filter results.
- SSH tunnel capabilities so that I can connect to remote servers securely.
- A UI that’s intuitive and doesn’t make me feel like a retard for not being Mr Uber DBA
HTTP Client
http://ditchnet.org/httpclient/
I’ll go as far as to say that if you’re doing any type of web service development, you NEED this app. It’s really really simple, all it does is execute an HTTP request based on the URL and parameters you provide it. Simple enough, you can do that in a browser the majority of the time. But here you’re guaranteed that you aren’t hitting a local cache, and you can see the HTTP headers. And best of all, you can save all of the settings. What we’ve done is that we’ve created sets of documents that we can use to test our web services when we’re doing development on them. It’s no unit tests, but it’s significantly less work. :P
