About once a year I’ll spend a day – sometimes two – evaluating IDE’s. I’ve been using Dream Weaver for the longest time, but for me it’s basically a glorified text editor with half decent code completion and syntax highlighting I’ve grown accustom to. It has almost no features I would like and my main complaint is it completely taxes one of my cores. I didn’t buy a quad core processor so a text editor could use 25% of my available horsepower even when it’s sitting idle.
Earlier this year I found the new – and always free – Aptana. Overall it’s good software. I wouldn’t say great, but it’s good. The problem with it also lies in its strength: It’s written in Java. It can be used on any platform, but it can be painfully slow when double clicking on files in the file browser and that’s a deal-breaker for me. It has some interesting features (like built-in FireFox preview) and for those looking to save their pennies, it’s by far your best option. I spent a few days here and there with it, but it never stuck. I spent a lot of time trying to configure it, but it just never felt comfortable.
So today I get a message from a developer and good friend of mine Tully that simply said “I found the best PHP IDE EVER. It’s like Zend, but not sh*t. It’s called PHPEd“ I took notice because that’s pretty good praise from him as he’s a bit on the cynical side. So I checked it out. The first thing I have to say is this:
I will never use another IDE for Web Development again.
There is nothing this IDE doesn’t do. For starters, the code completion and syntax highlighting which are my two biggest concerns are excellent and highly configurable (much like the entire IDE). The project management (including FTP) is top notch as well. You can assign different projects to the same domain with different subdirectories which is a feature I’ve never seen before. If this is all it did I would have switched just for these features. The implementation of these features is that good. Some of the things I wasn’t expecting was:
- Built-in SSH (being logged into the server you’re working on in a tab right next to the site you’re working on is priceless). I used to use a great program for this called SecureCRT (think putty, but better acct. management and a tabbed interface), but now I don’t need to have a separate application open just to log into a server. Depending on the kind of developer you are, this is a huge feature.
- Built in php4 and php5 engines running simultaneously. To top it off, it won’t have any effect on any other instances of php running on your machine – which is important because I use wamp5 religiously (who wants to have to upload a file every time they want to see their changes live?).
- Built in preview for IE and FireFox. Everyone has IE preview in their IDE, but the FireFox preview is a real gem in this genre of software. Aptana had it, but last I checked installing it was a pain (that may have changed now that it’s not beta). With PhpEd, it was a check box during install.
Those are the features that really stuck out for me. I would suggest anyone give it a try, you might be surprised. You’ll probably want to hit the Settings and spend a good amount of time in there as a lot of things just don’t feel right out-of-the-box. The delay for code completion (which is the best I’ve ever seen) needs to be reduced and some of the editor options should be played with to get the right feel, but overall I would give it 5 out of 5 stars. It is, by any measure, the perfect Web Development IDE. Period.
I agree with you that, for starters, like me, the code completion and syntax highlighting are trouble
Aptana is pretty well done. I never did like Notepad++ or any other pure text editor, but TextMate (for Mac only- there’s a clone for Windows I currently use called e ) is truly excellent to work with. I highly recommend checking it out. It’s not as huge a program as PHPed or Zend Studio, but it’s lightweight enough it never gets in the way, and the Bundles give you near-limitless flexibility for code completion, snippets, and so on.
I’ve moved on from PHP development (I’m in RoR now) but I tended to use Aptana and Dreamweaver when I did PHP devel.
Thank you for the link to e James. I’ll be downloading it and trying it out here shortly and I’ll post back with my thoughts on it.
As for RoR…
Ruby has never offered me anything desirable and developing on Rails won’t change that. If it did I’d be using OnTrax or Akelos – neither of which I find very useful. To me it’s just a lot of fuss and overhead for little gain. That said, it’s obviously got something people like because it was a pretty hot buzz-word for a while there.
I have phpEd. I wouldn’t be without it as a debugger, and the parenthesis matching is invaluable. It will more than pay for itself on the first job. It’s one of the best investments I’ve made. However, there is no way that it will be “The last Web Development IDE you will ever use” Dreamweaver has that hands down. phpEd is good at one thing, PHP, and it’s very good at it. You CAN use its parenthesis matching to advantage for JavaScript too, but it has no intelligent code indenting / formatting for any language, including PHP. It may well be “The last PHP IDE you will ever use.” and if they added code formatting, there would be no maybe about it.
I am using phpED for near about a year now. I was using dreamweaver prior to that.Just put yourself into the beauty of phpED once. I can assure you will never revert to any other IDE. It’s the dam best thing in the market.
Here is a comparison chart.Seeing is believing,