Besides a computer running Windows or Linux to develop and test your applications, you will need the following pieces of open source software:

How to obtain and install these packages is explained in detail in Chapter 2. We also use some additional plugins for jQuery and provide installation instructions where appropriate.

You will also need a web browser to interact with your applications. The applications were tested on Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8, but any moderately recent versions of these browsers will probably work just as well, as will Chrome. The Firebug extension for Firefox, however, is a superior tool to debug the client-side of web applications, so you might want to try it if you have not done so already. Appendix A provides links to the necessary resources.

Finally, you will need a text editor, preferably with syntax highlighting capabilities for Python as well as JavaScript and HTML. The author uses Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus-plus.org/) on Windows and JOE (http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net/) on Linux, but the choice is entirely up to you.