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.'"

Comments

Do any of them assess performance?

[jeffmeden]

This is not a troll, I swear! Are there any good performance assessment tools used during development? If so, do they work well with any of these IDEs? I don't do a lot of PHP work but it would be nice to have a tool that could audit code, advise on which lines were the most resource-intensive, and recommend lighter weight procedures.

VHS, x86, Microsoft Windows

[BadAnalogyGuy]

How is it that when given a set of options, the majority of users will select the worst possible one?

They didn't review Notepad, but I would wager that it is pretty well used by a majority of PHP "developers"

yep

[stoolpigeon]

Two of the top choices are free and open. I don't know how people who build proprietary tools are going to stay in business. It's not like the commercial stuff crushed the open stuff in this comparison. I've moved to Netbeans for pretty much everything. It's a solid, multiplatform solution and the open nature is very nice. Komodo is built on an open editor, but moving up to the full featured IDE is pretty pricey. At $399 a pop I've never tried Zend Studio and based on this - I don't think I'm missing much.