I need an IDE for typo3 core development in php

Question

Php in itself is difficult for IDEs because of the dynamic nature of the language.

My current development environment is mostly netbeans against a local svn copy of the codebase setup in a local development webserver. The code is full text indexed by vistas search engine for almost instant searches.

I do a lot of development directly against the main development server using a combination of tools. Putty to interact with the server and deploy by updating an svn checkout on the development server. Tortoise SVN locally to have a fairly rich SVN experience. Netbeans obviously have SVN integration. Most of the changes on the remote server is commited using the putty session. WinSCP to interact with the development server with norton commander like interface as well as the good putty integration.

Finally my text editor for remote editing is notepad++ out of habit and because of some nice features and good price.

What I'm really missing is good php editing. Because of the way typo3 works almost all objects are instanciated through make instance abstraction that either returns the base class or the customized class if the framework has been extended. I'm not looking for a magic editing package and would like to find an editor which can use annotations to specify the type of commonly used variables.

Answer 1

Eclipse PDT would be a solution. http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/

if it cant find the class on its own, you can use the phpdoc syntax to give it a hint. eg:

/**
* @var $foobar Class_Name
**/
$foobar = CallingStatic::MethodWhichReturnsAClass;

Answer 2

Wow, I'm amazed to hear you think php and IDE don't get along, those times are over. There is for example Aptana out there which offers you everything you're asking for and much more!

No need for all these tools, Aptana integrates all of these and has a great PHP plugin. The new Aptana 1.5 is also much faster and uses less resources than its predecessor.

Answer 3

I'm not looking for a magic editing package and would like to find an editor which can use annotations to specify the type of commonly used variables.

I 'm not exactly sure what you mean by this statement, but the Zeus editor has a template feature that might be of use. The templates provide a method of attaching a snippet of code to a keyword.

If the keyword is entered into the document and is followed by the spacebar, the template will fire and replace the keyword with the corresponding snippet of code.

Answer 4

You might want to take a look at Zend Studio. In my opinion the mighties PHP IDE out there.

It includes many features like: code assist, templates, php debugging, svn integration, ... (http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/features)