These are handy tools for your Development Environment.
The Netbeans Connector extension for Chrome allows you to see changes you’ve made to HTML pages the moment you save the file without having to refresh your browser. See also http://wiki.netbeans.org/ChromeExtensionInstallation
With Maven installed you can run mvn package and mvn test from the command line. It can be downloaded from https://maven.apache.org
PageKite is a fantastic service that can be used to share your local development environment over the Internet on a public IP address.
With PageKite running on your laptop, the world can access a URL such as http://pdurbin.pagekite.me to see what you see at http://localhost:8080
Sign up at https://pagekite.net and follow the installation instructions or simply download https://pagekite.net/pk/pagekite.py
The first time you run ./pagekite.py a file at ~/.pagekite.rc will be created. You can edit this file to configure PageKite to serve up port 8080 (the default GlassFish HTTP port) or the port of your choosing.
According to https://pagekite.net/support/free-for-foss/ PageKite (very generously!) offers free accounts to developers writing software the meets http://opensource.org/docs/definition.php such as Dataverse.
Vagrant allows you to spin up a virtual machine running Dataverse on your development workstation.
From the root of the git repo, run vagrant up and eventually you should be able to reach an installation of Dataverse at http://localhost:8888 (or whatever forwarded_port indicates in the Vagrantfile)
The Vagrant environment can also be used for Shibboleth testing in conjunction with PageKite configured like this:
service_on = http:@kitename : localhost:8888 : @kitesecret
service_on = https:@kitename : localhost:9999 : @kitesecret
Please note that before running vagrant up for the first time, you’ll need to ensure that required software (GlassFish, Solr, etc.) is available within Vagrant. If you type cd downloads and ./download.sh the software should be properly downloaded.