NYCPHP Meetup

[Jake McGraw]

>  I don't think Eclipse is great for PHP. I tried several plugins for PHP and
> they all gave me just more reason not to consider Eclipse as a PHP IDE. I
> don't mean that you can't use it for PHP, but getting decent IntelliSense,
> help, and the debugger to work wasn't easy. Or is there a plugin that does
> all that?
>  I found NuSpehere's PHPEd to be the best, followed closely by EnginSite's
> and Waterproof's editors. The major difference is that PHPEd has a way
> better debugger implementation and as far as I can tell Luckasoft stopped
> working on the EnginSite PHP Editor. Waterproof is releasing a beta for
> their new version and that might just be worth looking at it again.
>  Just to note, those are all Windows based IDEs, except for PHPEd, which
> also comes in a Linux version, but since that requires buying the same
> license again I did not bother. Which brings me to the disadvantges of
> NuSphere. They ruin the fun with theit great product by not allowing a
> license to be valid for dot releases. I bought one for 5.0 and three weeks
> later they released 5.1. I was quite miffed to find that the 5.0 license
> won't work for 5.1 and the changes weren't that spectacular that paying the
> upgrade price was worth it. I can see that a 5.x license won't work for a
> 6.x release given that 6.x adds substantially more features (and no, fixing
> bugs and design flaws aren't considered new features). I complained about
> it, but also in this case corporate greed won over customer satisfaction.
> Still, 5.0 does what I need and I did get it at a bargain price, so I am not
> that interested in discussing that any further with NuSphere. It's just that
> I probably switch once I outgrow what I got or it no longer works right.
>
>  Coming back to the previous topic, everyone has their preference for
> editors/IDEs and often it is just that, a preference, not a quality
> judgement. That is why I even prefer a nicely designed GUI on a server over
> the command line. Not that there is anything bad with using a command line,
> but for example installing a dozen packages via CLI vs. Synaptics makes me
> appreciate the GUI quite a bit. Just a preference, but one shared with many
> others.


Eclipse + PDT + (Turn code folding off, there's a bug in the latest
release) + Integrated SVN + xdebug = Win

Let's go over the pros:
 - Cross platform: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, all exactly the same
 - All of the plugins available for Eclipse will work with PDT
installed, there are hundreds of actively supported plugins for
Eclipse
 - Free
 - Lot's of shops (as far as I can tell) use it

Besides Eclipse, I occasionally use TextMate and vim, both of which
(TextMate is light weight, vim, well, sometimes you've got to go in
and make some quick changes) have their specific benefits.

- jake