![]() The folks at JetBrains have done a better job of cleaning up the UI and putting the buttons in places that are simpler to find and understand. I still find IDEs like Eclipse to be a bit arcane, with their complex trees that often hide important jobs in some deep corner of the hierarchy. PhpStorm exhibits much of the same attention to detail that made IntelliJ popular. It's still possible to run both IntelliJ and PhpStorm on the same machine. I suppose there might be some developers who are creating hybrid PHP/Java applications and might be disappointed by this, but I don't think there will be many. JetBrains' PHP tool, however, doesn't come integrated with its Java tool, unlike many of the other IDEs described here. PhpStorm PhpStorm is the product of a company that also makes Java IDEs, in this case JetBrains, which may be better known for the highly regarded IntelliJ. Zend Studio isn't as simple as some of the other IDEs, but it's a thoroughly modern setup packed with features. There are buttons to add JavaScript libraries and generally make life a bit easier for AJAX developers. Zend Studio is one of the more extensive IDEs, including features like a toolbar for Firefox and IE, although the toolbar wouldn't work with the latest version of Firefox that Mozilla automatically shoved into my system. Deployment options include using the local server, deploying to a distant version of Zend Server, or connecting to, and this flexibility comes with a price. There are a number of features for controlling the deployment, and configuration is not as simple as a push of one button. While Zend Studio said it could detect the Zend Server, I had to fiddle with several buttons until the application would deploy. In practice, it's easier to pay someone to make sure it's true.ĭespite all of this, there were still moments when I struggled. In theory, these plug-ins should play nicely together. You can use the various tools in Zend Studio separately as plug-ins, but installing the bundle made more sense. Zend integrates the plug-ins and removes the roadblocks before distributing everything as one big ball of code. Zend Studio, on the other hand, started right up. I had little luck getting the PDT plug-ins to work with my current version of Eclipse or even with a clean version of Eclipse I tried from scratch. Two of the main features you get for $299 are stability and testing. However, anyone using Eclipse can install other plug-ins with these features that work with all languages. For instance, Zend Studio offers GIT and SVN support, but PDT doesn't. Zend's website offers a long checklist of the differences between the PDT plug-ins and Zend Studio, but many of the differences have little to do with PHP development directly. These could probably be eliminated with some judicious pruning of the code - something that open source makes possible - but I lost patience. My version of Eclipse (3.7) wouldn't install the current PDT plug-ins because of a long list of conflicts. ![]() In theory, you can get many of Zend Studio's features for free with the open source PHP Development Toolkit (PDT), Eclipse plug-ins that are built in part with help from Zend. Zend Studio Zend Studio is one of the two major commercial packages built around plug-ins for the Eclipse platform. Two IDEs, Zend Studio and PhpStorm, stand out from the crowd. The good news is, whether you lean toward a heavyweight tool packed with features or a lighter-weight tool that brings some polish, there is an option here for you. Given the prevalence and maturity of PHP, I was surprised by some of the difficulties I ran into. Some of them seem to be bopping along in a state of neglect. The integrated tools manage the stacks of code, juggle deployments, catch debugging information, store the code in source repositories, and in some cases even automate deployment to the cloud.īut while the tools are more capable than ever, they often felt overly complex and sometimes even rough around the edges. The integrated development environments are proliferating, and more development is moving into the cloud. That technique is generally adequate for basic debugging because the traditional job of PHP is to do a bit of basic data manipulation and get out of the way when the database shows up to do the real work. When I needed to watch a variable, I would just print it into a Web page and trace the flow through there. In the past, I've generally relied upon emacs to create the code. There has been much progress over the years. I built some projects, modified some plug-ins for popular content management systems, and experimented with building another pile of PHP that will be worth many billions of dollars if I keep my fingers crossed. To get a flavor for the latest in PHP programming, I spent some time unpacking the current set of development tools for PHP - eight in all.
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