PHP IDE?

[Mad Duc]

Anyone here do a lot of PHP development? I'm stepping my game up and need something more powerful than Textpad. So what do you guys recommend? 

[darylbowden]

TextMate FTW.

You can also you Zend Studio, but it's pricey (and overrated) or the PHPEclipse plugin for Eclipse (it's actually pretty good), but TextMate is the shnizzle.

[Mad Duc]

Crap. OS-X only. No windows love.

[darylbowden]

Crap. OS-X only. No windows love.

Hehe sorry, I forgot that not everyone uses OSX.  In that case go with Eclipse and the PHPEclipse plugin.  It's free and works pretty damn well. 

eclipse.org and www.phpeclipse.de and that's all you need.

[cmorgan47]

vi?

seriously, for my PHP work, that's about all i use.  it does sometimes make me long for visual studio.

i've used eclipse for java work and it was pretty good

[Mad Duc]

Yeah, a simple text editor is great for php. I just want to see what else there is. Not sure what bells and whistles I want so I might try a few out. Soon the project isn't going to be just me and I would like to see what source control & other fun stuff can get packed in to make it easier for us to work together.

[darylbowden]

vi?

seriously, for my PHP work, that's about all i use.  it does sometimes make me long for visual studio.

i've used eclipse for java work and it was pretty good

It's good for on-the-fly editing, but if I'm building out an OOP PHP application, vi is pretty low on my list.

Yeah, a simple text editor is great for php. I just want to see what else there is. Not sure what bells and whistles I want so I might try a few out. Soon the project isn't going to be just me and I would like to see what source control & other fun stuff can get packed in to make it easier for us to work together.

Eclipse also supports SVN through subclipse which will give you the version control you're looking for. 

[cmorgan47]

to me, the problem with PHP isn't so much the IDE as the framework.  i've gotten so used to .NET coding at work that having to deal with all the plumbing to get data to and from the backend gets tedious fast.

pear's pretty good for that though.

[darylbowden]

to me, the problem with PHP isn't so much the IDE as the framework.  i've gotten so used to .NET coding at work that having to deal with all the plumbing to get data to and from the backend gets tedious fast.

pear's pretty good for that though.

Yeah, pretty much every dev I know has their own PDO-based class.  Using the built-in mysql functionality of php is a giant PITA, but at least with the class that I've built getting a result set is as simple as $results = $db->getAll($query);

It's funny cause the guys that do .NET love it, whereas I can't stand working in that environment.  Maybe it's like the Sharks vs. the Jets.

[cmorgan47]

.NET's gotten better with the 2.0 framework, and with 3.0 should be even more improved; i.e., i think they've built ajax controls in by default now.  it certainly takes some getting used to, but the ability to bind data to the front end and create decent rich web apps with little effort is pretty cool....

for years, though, i scoffed at is as the java ripoff that it is.

sorry for the thread jacking here.

coincidentally, i just had someone ask me to do some PHP coding, so i am sort of hoping some good options show up here.  if not, i'll end up trying eclipse again; as i said, it was decent for java.