05.24.06

IDE of the Week

Posted in Development at 8:53 am by Soabirw

It’s not a secret that I am fickle when it comes to my editors. Let’s see if I can even remember them all. Notepad (I know, shouldn’t even count), EditPlus, Dreamweaver (not gui mode), Vim, Emacs, Quanta Plus, Kwrite, gEdit, Jedit, Eclipse w/Tru Studio, Eclipse w/ PHPEclipse, PHPEdit, and some others I probably didn’t spend much time on. Maybe I’ll quickly touch on my favorites.

  • EditPlus - Just a great text editor to replace notepad and do light work. Very fast.
  • Eclipse - Best cross platform editor. Not a lot of good PHP support yet though.
  • Tru Studio - Free version is decent. Pay version gives a lot of instant debugging and polish.
  • PHPEclipse - It colors you code fine, but beyond that it is pretty lack luster.
  • PHPEdit - My 2nd favorite as of last week. Has most of the features you would want and some unique ones I’ve never seen elsewhere. For example, you can toggle between HTML and PHP in a file that has both. When you cursor moves into PHP all the HTML fades to a light grey and visa versa. Making it very obvious what you are editing. Fine code completion and hints, but gets very sluggish when using code completion on medium sized or bigger projects.

Now for my most favoritist. Zend Studio. I’ve only had the joy of trying this recently because work paid for it. It’s pretty pricey, but you can see where that cost goes. This thing has every feature I’ve loved except for PHPEdits HTML/PHP toggle. But it doesn’t need it since code completion and hint works in both modes just fine with good color coding. Here are my favorite features:

  • Good project management.
  • Fast code completion, even for very large projects. And I mean shit fast.
  • Code folding. You can collapse everything from classes to comments with quick shortcuts.
  • On the fly debugging. If there is a parse error in the line you just typed, it will underline it. All debug errors are red lines on the right side of you screen for quick access.
  • Server side debugging. You can actually run your scripts through an intense debugger right from you browser. Both IE and Firefox and toolbars for this.
  • Complete server package. It will install PHP and Apache for you if you want to work right off your workstation.
  • Inspectors. Quickly updates a table of contents for all your files and objects. Makes for quick accesses.
  • SQL interface. Nice gui for database and table structures. Bottom of editor lets you run queries so you can test them straight from you code.

I’m sure there is more I’m forgetting or haven’t come across yet. I am running it at home as well. After it’s impressive performance I just couldn’t stand the sluggish PHPEdit.

Since I mentioned the complete server package I think I’ll make a better recommendation. I am running XAMPP on my Windows (normally I do Linux at work) workstation and I am very impressed. Very easy to setup. I prefer MySQL Query Browser to the interface they provide, but other then that it is working out great. If you need FTP and E-mail it provides those too. FileZilla for FTP and Mercury for E-mail. I don’t use either, so can’t tell you anything about them. I just needed Apache with PHP to work on my checkouts.

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