php studio

Question

Hello fellow programmers. Is there any PHP "studio" like MS VS2008. By that I mean, in VS2005 you NEEDED to install IIS in order to run web applications in your computer, VS2008 creates a temporary mini server, so you don't HAVE to install IIS anymore in order to compile / debug in your computer.

Anyway, I'm looking for something like this for PHP, a couple of weeks ago I installed APACHE server in my computer and MySql too, and I was able to compile / debug PHP code (using an IDE called CodeLobster...), but I stumbled upon opening a connection to a database! When I tried doing that, it just didn't; I started googling around, and I found that I had to recompile PHP, and at that point I said, screw it, I'll find another way to debug. But now the project is more complex and I REALLY need to debug locally.

So my question is: Is there anything that runs PHP5 out of the box? Pretty much like VS2008.

Thank you.

BTW, I need to be able to run it in on a PC with Windows Vista and it's ok if it's not free.

Answer 1

Well, there's Eclipse with PHPEclipse.

Answer 2

Have a look at EasyEclipse for LAMP development:

http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/distributions/lamp.html

Answer 3

There is also VsPhp which runs PHP from within Visual Studio but I dont know how effective the debugging is. You can also try Zend Studio, but that it a bit on the expensive side. Eclipse is free and very functional, but again I dont know how its debugging compares to VS since I do all my php Debugging the old fashioned way on the server.

Answer 4

Since you're using Windows, try XAMPP. It's basically an integrated distribution of Apache, PHP, and MySQL (plus optional add-ons).

Answer 5

I've used phpED in the past (an older version than the currently available one). It has a debugger and a built-in php web server, meaning you don't need to install apache/IIS or php.

Answer 6

If you are comfortable in Visual Studio 2008, take a good look at VS.Php.

It is an add-in for Visual Studio (2005 or 2008) that adds support for PHP. Intellisense works as you'd expect, debugging works as you'd expect (set breakpoints and run) it includes a built-in/bundled web server (Apache) so you don't even have to worry about that.

The version I have supports both PHP 4 & 5 (though I seem to recall the author contemplating dropping PHP 4 support).

It costs $99 which in my opinion is well worth it since it allows me to do both my .Net and PHP development in the same IDE (Visual Studio 2008).

Answer 7

I use WAMPServer for the all-in-one installation, then PDT from eclipse.org for the development side of things (similar in intent to PHPEclipse).

Be sure to take the time and install (and get working!) the XDebug extension: that will give you breakpoints and step debugging from within PDT, too.

Answer 8

With PHP code you should do all debugging on the target architecture. Unless you're developing web apps that run on a client machine (and who would?) it would be totally inappropriate to do your testing on the same machine that you are writing your code on. This will prevent any platform and pathing eccentricities from arising in production. In addition, it allows you to test the code on multiple target platforms while "staging" the latest version.