PHP Development Environments
Aiming to get away from the bloat of Dreamweaver and the clunk of Zend Studio I’ve been exploring some alternative environments for my day-to-day PHP coding including NVu, Aptana IDE and PHP Designer.
After many years of using Dreamweaver MX as my primary frontend for web development I’ve learned that there are a few things I consistently require from a DE (Development Environment):
- Code highlighting;
- Easy ftp integration for uploading files;
- Ability to manage separate projects.
And that’s about it. It’s true that between Windows Explorer, Filezilla and Notepad++ I can easily perform all these tasks (and I make frequent use of all when making quick updates, or if I’m editing a single file) but the real key is to have everything bundled together so I rarely need to stray beyond the DE. Following is a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of each of the DEs I’ve tried.
Dreamweaver MX
I’ve used Dreamweaver MX pretty much since I started doing web design and it’s fair to say that it’s served me faithfully during that time. However, recently I’ve started using it for little more than writing code out (which could be done with a text editor) and uploading files to my server. Also, much of Dreamweaver’s functionality is geared towards those who are relatively new to web design. Frankly, given the cost and the size of the program I decided it was time to look elsewhere.
On the plus side, Dreamweaver does what it sets out to do pretty well, makes life easy for novice web designers and doesn’t go out of its way to ruin your code (you notice that I’m not even looking at Frontpage here…).
Aptana IDE
My first venture into Open Source DEs was Aptana. It wasn’t a happy experience. One of the most appealing features was Aptana’s claim to have a built-in PHP server . I couldn’t get this to work. As a backup you could connect Aptana to your own PHP server to provide the ability to preview PHP files. Nope, couldn’t get that working either. Aptana does, at least, allow you to upload your files to your server. However, setting that up was so unintuitive that I gave up.
Advantages of Aptana include support for Ajax, JavaScript, Python, Ruby on Rails, etc. Also, it is free so my grumbling does seem a little harsh in that context. Still, I suspect Aptana is great if you’re fully conversant in server management, but if you just want to code your site then it’s a slight case of overkill.
Zend Studio For Eclipse
Recently, I’ve also had the chance to test out Zend Studio. This is the commercial version of Aptana, so there are some similarities. Nevertheless, my experience with Zend has been a mostly positive one – but with one major caveat. Several times a day, if I leave Zend unattended for too long, it will lock up with the message ‘Synchronizing Resources’. There is no way of stopping this once it’s started. If I close Zend then it hangs with the message ‘Saving Workspace’. Extensive Googling has failed to deliver a satisfactory answer and, bearing in mind the loss of productivity (especially given this is not a free application) I’ve decided to pass on Zend Studio.
On the positive side it gives all the functionality of Aptana, and probably more, and seems a little simpler to manage.
Nvu
During the course of my research Nvu was one of the more pleasant surprises I encountered. However, it has to be said up front that Nvu is designed to be, more or less, a wysiwyg editor for web pages. As such it doesn’t offer much in the way of code highlighting. What it does give you is several very good preview options, including one that overlays your html tags on a preview of the page and allows you to select said tags. It allows you to publish your files and essentially makes a lot of basic things very easy for the novice designer. In that respect I can highly recommend. And it’s free too.
phpDesigner
So onto my final selection, and it looks like it could be a winner. By way of a disclaimer, phpDesigner is the DE I’ve had spent the least time with, but I like what I’ve seen already. One very useful aspect is its ability to integrate not only with Subversion, but also with the Tortoise SVN client. It offers full site/project organisation, allows you to integrate other frameworks and libraries, includes ftp functionality. In short, it does everything I need to do and a lot of other stuff that I haven’t yet explored (though the PHP Code Beautifier is particularly special – saves me going through my code and adding tabs, spaces, etc).
It’s not free, but it is pretty cheap. I’ll be making use of the 21 day free trial to decide if phpDesigner really is going to be my final choice and will be reporting my findings in due course.
