Hi,
Browser: Google Chrome
Many web app developers use Google Chrome because of its excellent developer tools. If that describes you, you’re done. Next item.
If not, plan to switch to Chrome for Lightning components development. We’ll cover why in the next two items.
Browser Debugger: Chrome DevTools
If you’re not already confident using Chrome DevTools, we highly, highly recommend the outstanding docs available. Start with Getting Started, and then move to the training, beginning with DevTools Overview. Every minute you spend learning to use DevTools is 10 minutes you’ll save later. (The payoff is more like 50-to-1, but we’ll be conservative.)
Yes, Firefox and Safari also have pretty good developer tools. But you’re switching anyway, because of the next item.
DevTools Extension: Salesforce Lightning Inspector
Developing for Lightning components without the Salesforce Lightning Inspector is like starting a fire by rubbing sticks together. You can do it, but it’s exercise, and who wants that?
What’s special about the Lightning Inspector? With this plug-in for DevTools, you can navigate the component tree, inspect component attributes, and profile component performance. You can observe and inspect calls to server-side actions and their responses. And it helps you understand the sequence of event firing and handling. (We explain all these terms in the next module on this trail, Lightning Component Core Concepts.)
These are critical tasks when you’re developing anything more complicated than hello world. Yes, you can do it manually with any decent JavaScript developer tool, but it’s not simple. The Lightning Inspector makes it easy, which is the difference between a painful developer experience and a pleasurable one.
Editor: Force.com IDE
Salesforce offers two editors with dedicated tooling for Lightning components. While the Developer Console is fine for quick edits and small scale learning projects, including this module, it’s not the best tool for developing real components and apps.
The best tool is the Force.com IDE, which adds dedicated navigation, syntax highlighting, and other Lightning components-specific features to the Eclipse IDE. The combination gives you a world-class development environment for Lightning components work.
Hope this helps.