4 replies to this topic

[scouseflip]

Hi All

Can anyone suggest any good development software for PHP? Don't know how much of a difference it makes but I work from a Windows XP machine but have access to 3rd party hosting both Windows (with PHP module installed) and Apache servers.

There seems to be a wide choice available so what would you recommend?

Cheers

[piskie]

First , I would recommend Linux/Apache rather than a Windows Server.
Second, I develop all my PHP code within Dreamweaver using a couple of add-ons.
However there are a load of PHP specific tools out there and most are available in trial mode for evaluation. Try Googling and see what you get.

[Mikl]

I did a survey of PHP development tools for my own use a couple of years ago. I couldn't find any GUI tools that I liked. I evaluated a few, but in the end decided to continue to code by hand, using Programmers Notepad as a text editor. This has good support for Intellisense, syntax highlighting, etc. for PHP.

Unfortunately, I can't find the notes I wrote at the time, so can't give you any more details of the products that I looked at. In any case, things have no doubt moved on since then.

For local testing of a PHP site under Windows, I use EasyPHP. It provides a basic runtime environment, with an Apache server and MySQL. I have not had any problems with it.

I also looked at ZZEE PHP GUI. This seemed a bit primitive, even for my basic needs. It didn't have any MySQL support, for example. I tried XAMPP, but couldn't get it to work.

Hope this is of some interest.

Mike

[scouseflip]

Thanks for the feedback

I've just downloaded programmers notebook which looks really useful, thanks for that. I had tried Netbeans previously but had some major problems with my PC shortly afterwards which our IT manager thought was caused by it so it has been wiped. Pitty as it seemed pretty smart...

[gwv2]

I use notepad++, which is a glorified text editor. And don't get scared off from WAMP- I've been doing PHP on Windows forever, and never had an issue.

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