InfoWorld's top picks in editors, IDEs, frameworks, and other tools programmers use The best open source application development tools That old debate — native app or Web? — has gathered new steam in the wake of the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. Then again, maybe not, thanks to a number of mobile development tools that let you build with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and still tap native features. Elsewhere, new tools and libraries as well as old (but not dusty!) standbys are bringing new levels of power and ease to both native coding and Web development (look, Ma, no plug-ins!). wxWidgets This C++ library allows developers to write GUI applications (such as Audacity, shown) and compile them for many different platforms. It has GUI platform support for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux/BSD/Unix with GTK+, the iPhone SDK, Windows Mobile, and more. And wxWidgets-compiled programs support the native GUI for each supported platform, rather than merely emulating the look and feel. wxWidgets also has hooks for popular scripting languages like Python, Perl, and Ruby. — High Mobley Boost A goldmine for the C++ programmer determined not to reinvent the wheel, Boost is a repository of function libraries boasting a high degree of peer review and portability. Many basic functions are provided through Boost — sort and search algorithms, regular expressions, common math operations — but there are tools for aiding the programmer directly, such as a C++ implementation of a “for each” function and message-passing interfaces for distributed architectures. A broad variety of open source and commercial applications (such as Adobe Photoshop CS5, shown here) use Boost libraries. — Serdar Yegulalp Open SourceDevelopment Tools