hi,
we are looking at moving our web development from a .net platform onto linux and php (mainly due to cost issues)
what are people using as their IDE to write php in, how do you go about debugging (i've only written php in text editors before and struggled stepping through etc), are we better of writing on a Linux or a windows platform?
Just after a general overview of what people are using
Cheers Luke
I use eclipse. It's very solid and has loads of plugins.
You can use XDebug with eclipse and Apache. Can be a bit of a pain to get up and running, but works really well and is free.
Re: windows or linux. Its an opinion but I'd say linux. You can work on either. IIS now has pretty good support for PHP, and you can if you want try to get PHP talking to ms sql, but I didn't get that right yet. PHP and MySql work really easily and well on linux
I use geany/gedit. Back in the day when I was on windows I used EmEditor. Honestly, it's not that bad. I feel a lot more productive than I would be in a heavyweight IDE.
I like to say that text editors keep me honest.
Previously I've used eclipse and also Komodo.
Now I'm using gvim.
I recently made a similar transition as well for one project, I ended up using the Eclipse Galileo release as it has good support for PHP and XHTML/CSS/Javascript.
I couldn't get XDebug to work properly with Eclipse, but Zend Debugger and Server combination worked like a charm. I'd recommend Eclipse + Zend
This Q might be useful:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/369366/good-lamp-books-for-asp-net-developer
Here are a couple of IDEs that are maybe worth considering:
I personally use TortoiseSVN/TortoiseGit for version control, ExpanDrive to safely mount external directories and a "simple" editor like UltraEdit on a Windows box. However this maybe is not the best solution for mid size or larger projects.
My recommended IDE for .Net developer's moving to PHP: Visual Studio. See my answer to this question for details.
Id make the break - go with Eclipse - its what I did and moving from .NET to PHP/Eclipse wasnt easy but worth it. I can't say that the latest Eclipse is bug free but its getting better. I also had to take over an existing PHP website and implement remote debuggin which wasn't easy the first time.... This was helpful Eclipse remote debugging