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The Best PHP IDE for Windows

Thu, 09/20/2007 - 17:37.
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I am always on the lookout for good IDEs, including the ones for PHP. There are several decent ones on the market. From the open-source ones, Eclipse with PDT does a decent job, for local development, if you do not mind extra weight of a JDK-based IDE. It has some other issues as well (poor support of on-the-server development via SFTP and forcing the use of pre-configured projects are a few), but Eclipse is not what we'd like to discuss in this post, today.

Today I stumbled upon a new (for me) Windows-based, PHP IDE: EngInSite PHP IDE and I was, quite frankly, blown away! EngInSite is, quite simply, the best PHP IDE on a Windows platform. I have been playing around with it for a couple hours now and I have to yet find a feature I would like that it does not have. It's a very rare example of a perfect tool.

Few important features from the long list of this IDE's capabilities:

  • File Navigator (display of a file's structure as a tree: functions, objects, variables)
  • Wonderfully implemented SFTP Support
  • Support for projects but no need to create a project. Folder view supported (useful for remote projects).
  • SVN support, CVS support, Diff support.
  • CSS/HTML/etc support.
  • PHP integration (embedded and/or external) and debugging. Support for both PHP4 and PHP5 and easy switching.
  • PHPDoc support
  • Rich set of debugging features like IP Monitor, HTTP Request modeler etc.
  • and many more...

Only two complains: I am very sad, personally, that it is not available for Macs and they really should create a much better website for such a nice product.

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Windows PHP IDE's

Submitted by tim (not verified) on Sat, 10/27/2007 - 02:46.

Hello, thanks for the interesting article. I've already been testing some PHP IDE's for Windows. The best ones I could find were PHP Designer 2007 and Zend Studio. I switched to Ubuntu a few months ago and now I primarily use Zend Studio Neon, which I can only use until the end of this year when the license expires. I've already thought about switching to PDT after the trial time, but I am still looking looking for a fast PHP IDE. Zend Studio Neon is built on top of PDT, so it performs quite poorly. I really hope you'll write more articles on this topic. Thanks in advance.

Best regards,
Tim

PHPDesigner 2008

Submitted by Dwayne Charrington (not verified) on Tue, 03/04/2008 - 07:13.

Just found your blog off Google. I am currently using PHPDesigner 2008 and it seems to be a very fast and stable IDE. It has support for HTML / CSS etc. Project management and whatnot. It's not a free program but I think it's worth the price. At least it's not based on Java right?

- Dwayne Charrington.
http://www.dwaynecharrigton.com

I use Zend Studio 5.5.1,

Submitted by Galaton Pavel (not verified) on Thu, 05/22/2008 - 11:06.

I use Zend Studio 5.5.1, it's very fast and stable.. but there is no CSS support