Popping the IDE cherry

Question

Although I've been a developer for years I've never used a PHP IDE - I've always just used a decent editor. What am I missing? I generally code on local servers so I can debug as if my code were running on my own machine, I have code highlighting, I have shortcuts set up to look up function names and so on. Is it worth investing the time in learning to use a full IDE? Is it worth investing the money in purchasing one?

Looking at (the slightly aging) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/116292/what-is-the-best-ide-for-php I would probably go for PhpDesigner or possibly Eclipse.

Answer 1

phped from nusphere. We prefer it over zend http://www.nusphere.com/

Answer 2

I use Eclipse and Zend CE and coming from many years of TextPad development the biggest bonus for me is line by line debugging. It can be a pain to set up however once it is, stepping through the code has saved me countless hours of print_r and vardumping

Answer 3

Consider Netbeans

It's free and has excellent php support including recent features. It's also quite lighter than Eclipse especially on projects with numerous files, speaking as a recent convert.

Since you already have syntax highlighting, here are some extra features you will appreciate once you start using them in an IDE, most coming from the language knowledge the program has by continuously parsing your code:

• step by step debugging, so you don't have to guess or continuously log/print variable content
• error highlighting
• variable autocomplete
• variable usage highlighting
• goto source for functions and variables (useful for navigating complex applications)

Answer 4

I've used both Eclipse (PDT) and NetBeans for PHP development. Both have their merits, but lately I tend to use NetBeans more often, since it seems to be a lot faster.

Oh, one thing though, even though NetBeans could lead you to believe that refactoring doesn't work for PHP (if you right-click and select Refactor, Rename), don't let yourself be fooled : it does actually work if you use the keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-R).

I also had a look at Zend Studio recently, and it does look nice (well basically it's Eclipse PDT with some extra features added to it), but didn't offer any extra functionality that I needed or miss in Eclipse PDT/NetBeans so I'll stick to those for now.

Answer 5

I've tried every IDE for PHP and did not like one of them. Most of all I was too used to some Notepad++ features.

Lately I tried PHP storm and it's excellent. It undoubtedly has the richest feature set of all IDE's - and also has most everything that Notepad++ has. Although it's a very new tool, the company is a veteran in the IDE field.

It's not free, but it's not expensive either - yet. Has a long trial period and you can use it afterwards - it just closes every half an hour, but that's it.

Answer 6

I'm an IDE-gui and use IDEs for C/C++, Perl, PHP and whatsoever. For PHP, in order to write a small script and to debug them, I use the Komodo-IDE (same for Perl). For handling complex web-projects with PHP, HTML and Templates (on windows dev machines), I'd use NuSphere PhpED. Occasionally, I use Netbeans for everything, especially in Unix environments. For C/C++, on windows machines there's only one IDE that really stands out (guess what).

Regards

rbo

Answer 7

i've been using nuSphere, netbeans and eclipse for a while, and of these three, i find netbeans the most usefull. it doesn't hang as often as eclipse does, and it has a lot of shortcuts for project browsing. i find myself browsing the projects a lot faster using netbeans than the other 2, and it has a lot of features you most likely won't use, but you can disable them so they won't eat up resources.