Three good PHP IDE's … that's 'nerd' for PHP Programs

Hi,

So you want to write PHP code but you are not sure what program to use? Well, there are many options out there for PHP nerds (which is good) but again, which one to use?

Many times, this comes down to personal taste and I don’t know all the options out there … so I will limit it to three:

http://netbeans.org/features/php/

From the Netbeans site:

The NetBeans project offers a version of the IDE tailor-made for developing PHP web sites that comprise a variety of scripting and mark-up languages. The PHP editor is dynamically integrated with HTML, JavaScript and CSS editing features.

Focus on the code and speed up code scanning by excluding individual directories in the Project properties. The NetBeans IDE fully supports iterative development, so testing PHP projects follows the classic patterns familiar to web developers.

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/

I encourage you to try all three options and see what you prefer. Netbeans and Eclipse are more for programmers and have very powerful tool sets in that regard (that means they have all the bells & whistles) but for web designers getting into PHP, Dreamweaver maybe the choice.

… OK, Dreamweaver is not the best at PHP and I would probably not recommend it for hardcore PHP application development. But if you are building small to medium sized PHP applications, then it can more that handle the job with its’ basic code hinting, macros etc.

Stefan