InfoWorld has a new article posted looking at some of the PHP IDE options out there and comparing some of their strengths and weaknesses including PHPStorm, Eclipse, Aptana and Zend Studio.

PHP is more than just a language for junior high school kids to learn after they master balancing DIV tags in HTML. It can support enterprise-grade installations and deliver the kind of heavy lifting that brings power plants to their knees. [...] To get a flavor for the latest in PHP programming, I spent some time unpacking the current set of development tools for PHP - eight in all.

The IDEs he sampled were:

• Zend Studio
• PHPStorm
• PhpEd
• phpDesigner
• NetBeans
• Komodo IDE
• CodeLobster
• Aptana Studio

He points out that, while all of these tools have their good and bad things about them, sometimes you don't need something that heavy to get the job done. Sometimes something simpler might do just right. He recommends trying them out on your projects and seeing which is the best fit, though. He thinks that you'd probably "need to be working on a bigger PHP project" before an IDE would become really useful though.

Hasin Haydertalks about "getting comfy with PHPStorm" a relatively recent addition to the IDE ranks for PHP.

I am a big time fan of Netbeans and I left it a few days after it's release of 6.7. It was so good, heavenly, yummy but I had to leave this old pal because of it's extreme hunger to the available resources. [...] I left Netbeans and started using PhpStorm. I have a company license and I am glad that I made this move. I am not going to preach PhpStorm in rest of this article, but what I will do is sharing my experience with PhpStorm.

He goes through a list of his favorite things about the IDE - its speed it operates at overall, great Javascript/HTML intellisense, version control integration, less resource intensive and that it costs less overall (and comes from a "developer friendly" company).

If you're interested in trying out PHPStorm for yourself, you can find a demo at http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm.

Andrew Eddie has posted a helpful tutorial for Eclipse users out there showing how to get the most our of code assist in Eclipse PDT/Zend Studio.

One of the powerful features of an IDE like Eclipse is the ability for it to "read" your code and give you some assistance about your API as you type. This could include things like class property or methods names, constants, functions, argument lists, and so on. Eclipse/PDT and ZendStudio do this by parsing a PHP class directly, but they also look at your docblocks and some other special comments where the raw PHP is not enough. This article is a bag of tricks that help you get the most out of code assistance using Eclipse/PDT or Zend Studio in those awkward corners of your code that you might have through previously inaccessible.

Among his tips are things like adding "@var" declarations to help with code completion, type hinting on methods/functions, using the "@property" annotation and using a "this" trick to override what class the IDE sees as the local object. ,/p>

A few days ago Kevin Schroeder showed how to connect the Zend cloud services with the Zend Studio IDE. In this new post he shows how to connect another popular IDE - PHPStorm.

Just because you want to use the Zend Developer Cloud at phpcloud.com doesn't mean that you necessarily use Zend Studio. While I may wonder why you don't use Zend Studio ( :-) ) I know there are a lot of other good IDE's on the market and an IDE like PHPStorm might suit how you do your development.

He walks you through the whole process, complete with screenshots - creating the project on phpcloud, cloning your git repo there, configure PHPStorm for deployment (via SFTP) and set up a little path mapping.

If you're a Zend Studio user and have been wondering how to hook it directly into the phpcloud service from Zend, Kevin Schroeder has posted complete instructions in a new post today (complete with screenshots).

PHPCloud.com is the landing page for our new cloud offering. Using the Zend Application Fabric you can build your applications in the same environment as you will be deploying your apps to. The application is built on my.phpcloud.com and you can then deploy it onto any platform where the Fabric is supported. But how do you get started? Phpcloud.com has been built in a way where you can connect with any IDE. With Zend Studio 9 that connectivity has been built directly in to the IDE.

It's a simple six (well, technically seven) step process that involves setting up a new project, configuring some deployment options and hitting "deploy". Zend Studio makes it super simple to launch your application as many times as you need - a one-click deploy once things are all set up.

Sometime debugging PHP applications isn't as easy as just pointing your IDE directly at the server and starting to work. Derick Rethans has a new post talking about one such situation, remote debugging with a firewall in between you and the remote machine with XDebug.

The PHP debugging extension Xdebug has "remote" debugging capabilities for single-step debugging PHP applications. This works by setting your favourite IDE into listening mode and instructing Xdebug (with one of the handy browser extensions for example) to initiate debugging. [...] There could however be a firewall in the way that prevents Xdebug connecting directly to your IDE's IP address. That can be because the network you are on employs NAT. [...] In this case, there is no way Xdebug can connect to your IDE's IP address and port. Or is there?

His alternative requires SSH access to the remote machine - building a tunnel from your local machine to the remote server XDebug can use to get around the firewall. He explains the shell command to set up the tunnel and, a more graphical way, through the Putty ssh/telnet client. A quick call to "netstat" can tell you if things are working correctly or not. All that's left then is to point your XDebug to the port on the localhost and you should be good to go on debugging.

In this quick post today Robert Basic shares a hint for using Xdebug together with Zend Framework unit tests to get effective results.

I've spent this weekend hacking on some unit tests for ZendDojo and I ran into an issue where I need Xdebug to, well, debug. Note, that this is not for debugging a Zend Framework application, but for debugging Zend Framework itself. I am using Netbeans + Xdebug to debug regular code, but debugging unit tests was something completely new for me. Turns out, it's not entirely different from "regular" debugging.

Thanks to hints from this post and some trial and error on working with autoloading, he finally got things working in his Netbeans environment. The trick is setting up the "Index File" to the correct location.

In a new post to his blog Sasa Stamenkovic compares two of the most popular IDEs PHP developers are using these days - Eclipse and NetBeans and how they stack up on various criteria including configuration, navigation, version control support and debugging.

I was happy Eclipse fanboy for quite a long time, and I can say that I still am. I like to try out new things, but this IDE was doing perfect job and I stick to it for PHP development. But few months ago I have tried NetBeans 7.0, and boy, after few hours it felt like home. At the end of the day, with all respect to Eclipse, I decided to switch. I will try to compare this two, but before we start I must say that they are both very good at what they do, and no matter which one you choose it will do great job for sure.

He includes descriptions and screenshots for quite a bit of the features, comparing the interfaces as well as the bundled functionality for the following:

• configuration options
• code completion abilities
• general application navigation
• code formatting abilities
• version control support
• debugging integration
• testing support (unit tests, etc.)
• plugins
• and perfomance

Rafael Dohms has, in a recent post to his blog, shown how to set up NetBeans to use PHPUnit tests with XDebug. This allows him to run his unit test and track down problems with the handy XDebug extension right from his IDE.

Every now and then you run into this weird situation in your code, where something that was supposed to zig is now zagging and it makes no sense whatsoever. For me this ends up happening in my unit tests since i'm not running everything in the browser everytime and since my tests usually run more scenarios then a regular browser run, that's where the weird stuff happens.

He shows you how to configure NetBeans with the path to your local PHP installation, configure the xdebug settings in your php.ini and how to coordinate the PHPUnit install to send its output to your NetBeans instance. Then it's as simple as clicking "Debug" on the project and running "phpunit-debug" from the command line.

James Cohen has a recent post to his blog looking at a way you can avoid some of the character encoding problems in PHP that can come with working with multiple character sets.

Character sets can be confusing at the best of times. This post aims to explain the potential problems and suggest solutions. Although this is applied to PHP and a typical LAMP stack you can apply the same principles to any multi-tier stack.

He includes a "boring history" session (and recommends skipping if you just want the good stuff) that talks a bit about character sets and their history in computer system handling. All that said, he recommends using UTF-8 to ease your character encoding woes. He talks about configuring your editor to support it, making sure your browsers understand it and setting up your MySQL database connection to use it.