What PHP IDE do you use and why?

[polarmate]

Calling all PHP programmers!!

Please help me decide on which PHP IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is the best and most versatile by telling me about your experiences with the toolset that you use. I would also prefer that the IDE includes a debugger.

[robwatts]

Hi Manisha

I think this is pretty good.

http://www.phpide.com/go/downloads.htm


PHP Coder
PHP Coder is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) especially designed for PHP programmers. Features include full integration of the PHP Interpreter and the PHP documentation, and integrated Preview window, full syntax highlighting for HTML and PHP, an AutoComplete function for frequently used text constructs, a project manager, tag buttons, and many standard editing functions
This update fixes many bugs and adds Script Insight technology (IntelliSense known from MS Visual C++ for PHP), an enhanced class browser and documentation viewer (for PHP docs, your database docs, and an HTML reference), PHP Keyword completion, Barce matching, extended search-and-replace functionality, and much more.



Why do I use it? Cos, its simple and easy to use and has a preview code option thing that enables your to quickly see the outputs on your local machine ( dependant on local set up)

Works for me :)

[polarmate]

Thanks, Rob! I found PHP Coder soon after I started this thread. I installed it and I quite like it. I am also trying out the DBG PHP Decoder. It does seem to have problems reporting values of boolean variables but I am willing to live with that because it's terrific to be able to step through server-side code.

[ArmenT]

ZendStudio (http://www.zend.com/store/) is very good. They offer an advanced IDE as well as a free personal edition. Incidentally, Zend are the authors of PHP.

UltraEdit (http://www.ultraedit.com/) is another very good PHP editor that a lot of programmers swear by. They provide separate modules for a variety of languages that do automatic syntax highlighting here http://www.ultraedit.com/downloads/additional.html

There's also GNU Emacs, which is my personal favourite and works for just about any language and operating system.

[polarmate]

Thanks, Armen! I will check them out. Do any of these suites contain a debugger or is DBG the only one?

[JasonMichael]

From what I've heard, Zend offers some of the best stuff for PHP, but the professional stuff is very pricey.

I use HTML-Kit, simply to get the nice colorized code for HTML and PHP and a bit of HTML,CSS tools, as well. Plus its free software.

[polarmate]

:hi: Jason! HTML-Kit is very versatile and it is now the main tool I use for coding.

[JasonMichael]

Oh good! Yes, I really like it, since its so lightweight. I have the latest and greatest Dreamweaver, which some of my buddies try coding PHP in, and its a joke! DW is a memory and CPU cycle hog.

I use Dreamweaver strictly for design, but code my PHP in HTML-Kit.