PHP: What do you use to write it?

Question

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What is the best IDE for PHP ?

Hello again everybody,

I finish my work placement next week and have over a month off before I start my studies again. Being the super cool party animal that I am I have decided to use the time getting a firmer grip on PHP. I recently bought the highly recommended book 'PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice' 3rd Edition by Matt Zandstra and have completed the Zend Tutorials.

I was wondering if anyone had any other good sources of beginner/intermediate material they would recommended?

I'm also very interested in the development environment and software people use to code in. At the moment I just use Scite, which for those who haven't come across it is basically notepad that colours your code in.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Jonny

Answer 1

I'd find a project or website that you want to emulate and start building it. There really is no better way to learn I think than having real world challenges to overcome. More often than not you'll find that you will face the same challenges over and over, and when you have a firm grip of them, things become much easier.

As for development, I was a firm Aptana (www.aptana.com) fan in v1.5, but I've since switched to Netbeans (www.netbeans.com).

Answer 2

My main advice is:

1. Learn to identify and skip outdated PHP tutorials
2. Use the official manual from php.net
3. Use version control software. Anyone. They are all better than using none

Update

My original answer began with a tongue-in-cheek classification of PHP editors and IDEs that appears to have distracted attention from the important stuff so I'm moving it to an appendix. It's worth noting that the politically correct word for "fast" in the context of software applications is "alternative pace performance". No Indonesians were harmed in the making of this article.

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Of course, the What Is The Best PHP Editor question will always be around and will never get a definitive answer. These are the big categories:

• Ultra lightning fast text editors with syntax highlighting and little else.
• Mastodontic IDEs written in Java with poor editors.
• Commercial IDEs with 100+ utility panels all around the window.
• Unix editors that have somehow survived the 1970s.

Just choose yourself ;-)

Answer 3

You didn't mention the environment, but if you're using Windows and you don't need a complicated IDE, here's a simple/lightweight solution: use Notepad2 for PHP/HTML/XML text editing, any PDF reader for the PHP manual, along with TortoiseSVN for version control.

Answer 4

The best platform for PHP related development is any flavor of *nix. I recently shifted to Ubuntu (current stable version 10.04) and found it very easy to setup and use.

A single command sudo tasksel install lamp-server will install everything you need for PHP development like Apache, PHP and MySQL. And as David suggested, use Aptana for coding. Using SVN or Git for version control is also preferred.

Finally, learn some PHP framework like CakePHP (http://cakephp.org) or Zend Framework (http://framework.zend.com/). It will reduce your development time a lot.

HTH

Answer 5

I use e text editor on Windows at work, with WampServer and GIT.