ONLINE TOOLS FOR TESTING CODE

Before you start setting all this up on your home system, and if you want to play with small snippets of code, try online solutions, such as Codepen and Jsfiddle.

Codepen has a pleasing design and it’s easy to move around the desktop. For completeness, you have a window for HTML, one for CSS, and finally one for JavaScript. Each window also has options to analyze your code in different ways. The features are Tidy, Analyze, and Show Compiled. These are useful if you have a bad habit of indenting poorly, or just can’t figure out what you’ve done wrong. You can choose where you want your code to show. The three windows with code can be on the right, left, or bottom. When you want to start your own project, you have several templates available to get started. Your finished project can be downloaded as a zip archive.

Jsfiddle is similar to Codepen, but has more view options and templates. It also has a neat drop-down list where you can choose language, library, and other values for your code. In Jsfiddle, you also have a collaborate function. When you activate this feature, you create a link that you share with someone you trust, and you can both work on the same code together.

These tools are great for testing new ideas and building the initial code. However, if you already have code on GitHub, then you can link directly to it on Jsfiddle.