There are several tools available to develop and test contracts. One of the simplest tools is provided on the official Ethereum site itself. The tool is called Remix, we will use this for our contract development.

Remix for Contract Development

Open the Remix IDE by typing in the following URL in your browser.

The following screen will appear.

In the center window, you will see some default code, which is a sample Solidity code. You will type your contract code in this code editor. Your code may be auto-compiled. Upon successful compilation of the code, you will be able to run the code in the same IDE. When you execute the contract methods, the results will be displayed in the same IDE window. There are facilities to debug the code and to unit test your project. These can be seen in the menu bar at the top right hand side as shown in the IDE screenshot below. You will be using these options shortly.

You will now start writing your contract.