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Eight PHP IDEs Compared
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Rick Grehen provides an in-depth comparative review of eight PHP IDEs: ActiveState's Komodo IDE, CodeLobster PHP Edition, Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT), MPSoftware's phpDesigner, NetBeans IDE for PHP, NuSphere's PhpED, WaterProof's PHPEdit, and Zend Studio. 'All of these PHP toolkits offer strong support for the other languages and environments (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL database) that a PHP developer encounters. The key differences we discovered were in the tools they provide (HTML inspector, SQL management system) for various tasks, the quality of their documentation, and general ease-of-use,' Grehen writes.'"
Yeah, they also gave Zend 9/10 for tools and 10/10 for Value when it's basically just Eclipse PDT with a toolbar button for the command line tool that comes free with the Zend framework and costs $399 per year for the privilege.
Well, I suppose it can do more if you pay an extra $1195 per year for Zend server. Did I mention that Zend server is basically little more than just a pre-configured Apache setup?
Perhaps I've been spoilt by Visual Studio which actually costs much less and gives you far more, or the fact that 99.99% of Zend Studio's functionality is just inherited from Eclipse which is free, but the idea of giving Zend Studio 10/10 for value is er, baffling to say the least- at least their 9/10 for tools can be somewhat justified by the fact most of them are just inherited from the free tools Eclipse provides.
I suppose at least they still gave positive reviews of the other IDEs, but the idea that Zend Studio is somehow better than them, well, I'm not really sure there's a word for how simply not true that is.
So er yeah, still, most the article is probably one of the finest loads of bollocks I've ever seen which is quite impressive, sseing as I've often made the mistake of reading The Register which is basically like a bollocks farm.
Aside from using XCode, I pretty much never use IDEs, especially for web development. I just use TextMate for anything not in XCode (and I even edit a lot of C/C++/Obj-C in XCode nowadays, and other apps for performance, testing, etc. (or write TextMate commands to run external commands).
-Matthew Riley "TofuMatt" MacPherson
I have a website
Hehe, I didn't notice that line for some reason when I made my reply, but to be fair he didn't use the term professionally so he's probably right- most PHP developers are far from professional after all ;)
Developing large scale web applications where you need more than just a bunch of php files and need a decent folder structure ala most MVC frameworks becomes a pain without a proper IDE as you note.