PHP IDE

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phpuser007
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Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Apr 04, 2009 10:09 pm

PHP IDE

Post by phpuser007 »

Dear forum members,
Not long ago I developed interest in PHP partly because I wanted to host my own site, blog, and forum among other reasons. Anyways, I searched on the internet and basically found phpBB to create my forum and another software to create my blog. So the next logical step for me was to learn PHP and so my search began for an IDE. I decided to look up one and propose to you all.

I am a VB and VBScript programmer and so I looked for a programming environment that would address the deficiences I found in other VBScript editors and have at least the same capabilities of VB6 IDE. I found phpDesigner. phpDesigner is produced by MPSoftware. It can be found at http://www.mpsoftware.dk/.

Although software name is phpDesigner it also supports HTML, CSS, VBScript, JavaScript, XML, Perl, Java, C#, Python, Ruby, and SQL. I will focus on PHP features, IDE, and editor.

First I would like to say that the interface is simple and user friendly and can be customized. Five important features I look for in an IDE are ease of creating, editing, analyzing, debugging, and documenting project or code. phpDesigner provides to user all of these capabilities.

phpDesigner provides workspace and project management and customization capabilities. It took me little to no time in getting familiar with the IDE and creating workspaces and projects.

phpDesigner provides many features to make code analysis easy. Notably, the code explorer feature can be use to look up PHP classes, functions, variables, etc. and their detailed information. You can also use filtering capability to narrow your search.

phpDesigner has several features that make editing the code a breeze. Most important features are syntax highlighting, find and jump to declarations, advanced search and replace, code snippets, code beautifier, object oriented programming, code completion and code tip, search and jump to files, remote FTP editing, highlight matching brackets, highlight missing brackets, highlight matching HTML tags, and highlight missing HTML tags. Each of these features increases your efficiency and productivity when developing programs. I've used some basic editors for VBScript and I remember how tied up I felt due to the lack of the above mentioned features in those editors. In phpDesigner I don't have to worry about editing nightmares anymore. I find all of these features very useful when writing and editing my code.

The job is not done after writing the code. One has to debug and test his or her code. phpDesigner offers some good debug features to make code debugging smooth and efficient. The features include debugging and profiling of code, and live error detection. Debugging in phpDesigner is very similar to VB6 and VS. You can add breakpoints, trace code execution path, add variables to watch, debug watching, and a profiler to evaluate code performance.

Last but certainly not the least phpDesigner has phpDocumenter that provides capability to document your code.

In conclusion, phpDesigner has necessary features and functionality that a developer needs to write optimized, efficient, and high performance code. It enables a developer to be efficient and productive. It is a professional programming environment with excellent help and support. I hope that you will try phpDesigner and see for yourself whether it suits your needs. I liked it very much and I am confident that you will too.

Thanks,
Pradeep
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