On 21 Aug 2002 at 8:55, Michael Egan wrote: > I know similar threads have come up on this in the past but I suspect > it's a constantly changing picture. > > I recently saw a favourable review of Zend Studio 2.5 but wondered, out > of curiosity, what sort of tools people use to develop PHP scripts and > MySQL databases, tables and queries. > > Up until now, in an attempt to try and get to grips with these packages, > I've been using a variety of text editors from VI to Kwrite. But I'm > wondering whether it might speed up development times if I start to use > one of the tools out there for working with PHP and MySQL.
This should really go in a FAQ. I don't know if there is a live FAQ for PHP based on this list. ? Anyhow, this is one of my pet peeves. Nothing gives me the shudders more when I encounter a *developer* who ONLY knows a GUI. Any conscientious person should always seek better ways to do what they do. So I always go out and try these IDEs and so far I've always returned to Textpad and the really good developers I know who use unix/linux for a workstation use emacs and vi. A naïve user might find this odd. But you must understand that we also have scripting tools (usually Perl) coupled with an ability to type (above 60wpm) and "at hand" knowledge of the language. I and others also extensively use code libraries so we don't re-invent the wheel and consequently overbill. The only IDE that has impressed me, up until now, was the M$ stuff but I don't do VB, Visual C++ etc. But now I just downloaded this one: http://www.phpedit.com/ > PHPEdit is a full featured PHP IDE for Windows. It has code insight, > code completion, syntax-highlighting, integrated debugger, code browser, > keyboard templates, and even more. Most IDEs make the simple simple or worse, difficult and nearly always difficult to later edit by hand. PHPEdit RECOGNIZES the the *classes* that you use in your scripts. It loads them. You can acccess them via the code browser. It recognizes all the methods in your file (according to class) and lists them for easy movement. This IDE has great potential imho. It's just the sort of thing that I have been looking for. It doesn't not try to help me do the simple things. It helps me organize and access my code. I don't think this would help the developer who doesn't know anything. It doesn't seem 100%. It has a nice feature where I can plug in documentation which gets loaded in the HELP browser window. This isn't working for me. It could be my fault. I have not investigated that much, but such a thing is quite, quite good, I still don't know PHP well enough to just write from brain to keyboard. BTW, other tools I use in development: Treepad (organize all sorts of data easily, http://www.treepad.com/ I use the free version) Of course I have my own Perl scripts for s/r but I also use this a lot (primarily just for the search): http://www.funduc.com/search_replace.htm CuteFTP (I really hate this program for the stupid things it does but it's still the best I've found, I detest using my mouse and I can do a lot with cuteftp from the keyboard, but it's braindead and the developers don't respond to my suggestions for improvement, it might be I need to rethink my development model). WinTelnet, I don't use the ftp app it comes with. I only use this because it SAVES all the servers I login to. At one time I had over 50 and I wasn't going to remember all the usernames/passwords and type the login all the time. This app logs me in and gets me to the command line. Oddly, it's not rated high here: http://cws.internet.com/telnet.html SSH Secure Shell 2.3, when I gotta use SSH. This could be a lot better. but it's okay. TextPad (for those of us who have not learned emacs or vi well enough :) http://www.textpad.com/ cygwin (get all those great linux tools on your windows box. I've got KDE running in another window :) Perl (knowledge of a scripting language is a great tool, I've never used PHP from a cli as I started as a Perl programmer) Opera, IE, Mozilla (mozilla and Opera make it easier to turn cookies on/off and view them and lots of other things) http://validator.w3.org/ (make sure the code adheres to a standard, I use the referrer as my html is never whole until you request a page) Peter -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
