We have come a long way from those early Apple II days. In 1978 all we had was Microsoft Basic and 6502 assembly language, then came UCSD Pascal. Most of the software development tools were created from scratch from hand written (as in pen and paper) documents.

Today we have all sorts of Integrated Development Environments (IDE) to choose from here are a few that we use :

• Visual Studio
• Dreamweaver
• Zend
• Aptana 

Of course there are still times when a homegrown tool is best for a specialist task.

Then there are the frameworks here are a few that we use :

• CakePHP
• Ruby on Rails
• Zend