PHP IDEs
One of the motivating factors of blowing the dust off my old blog is that I’m about to start investigating some possible changes to the way we develop websites at work. This is going to involve looking at quite a few solutions and I thought it might be interesting to get some thoughts on these up on the web as I go through the process.
The reason for the possible change is that the projects we are working on are getting larger and more complex. Our current processes work fine, but we do seem to be getting to the stage where there are improvements in terms of efficiency to be made. This should pay of particularly further along the line when updates are required to these larger projects.
The idea is to move towards an MVC model and probably work with one of the PHP frameworks, but there are a few ducks that I need to get in a row before we do that.
Step 1 - Looking at IDEs
This is a small step, but one that is necessary for the other changes that we have planned. We develop in PHP5 and mySQL. Coding is currently done in Dreamweaver, Interakt and Context (a slightly jazzed up notepad replacement). All of these tools work perfectly well, but are really going to start showing their limitations as our methods move on.
My first task is to look at some of the IDEs that are available for PHP and find one that suits the way we work and will serve us well as things move forward. I know that everyone is going to start shouting “Zend” at me about now, but only playing around with some alternatives will tell if it will be the best choice for us.
Digging around on the web for a few minutes has turned up a nice little list to get started with:
At the moment I know little about any of these IDEs. My next post on this topic will be comparing the features of each to see if I can narrow down the list a bit.
[...] hum. I had this morning set aside to get stuck in to my look at PHP IDEs and I have to say that it hasn’t been the greatest success so [...]