Development environment

To make a distributed app (dApp), you will usually need:

• One or more contracts (written in Solidity)
• A client that talks to your contract

It is recommended to develop dApp clients using common web development languages: HTML, Javascript, CSS. The two biggest advantages of this are:

• Many people already know how to make web applications and can leverage their existing knowledge
• Apps can in the future easily run in Mist, a browser for Ethereum dApps

There's a bunch of useful tools to get started developing dApps. The choice depends to some extent on your prior experience developing web applications.

Truffle is a command line tool setting up a project and simplifying a lot of common tasks. The list of features is already long and the tool is actively developed. Especially if you don't have much experience setting up web projects, this is a great choice. The team already made some good decisions for you, so you can get started right away.

If you have experience with Webpack, you should check out this setup. It does most of the key things that Truffle does, with the added advantage that instead of learning a new command line tool you can just continue using what you used before, and also leverage the huge community around Webpack and its extensions.