The /Dev/Hell podcast has posted the latest episode of their podcast (as hosted by Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) - Episode #29, "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions".

Being totally out of ideas, we turned things over to our legions of fans who joined us on IRC. Lots of interesting questions, and people learned what Ed thought was horseshit.

As you can imagine, there's lots of topics covered including some discussion of PHP IDEs, if PHP has reached its limit and liberal versus conservative programmers. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

Maarten Balliauw has a new post today showing you how to work with your Azure site from inside the popular PHP IDE phpStorm.

Working with Windows Azure and my new toy (PhpStorm), I wanted to have support for doing specific actions like creating a new web site or a new database in the IDE. Since I'm not a Java guy, writing a plugin was not an option. Fortunately, PhpStorm (or WebStorm for that matter) provide support for issuing commands from the IDE. Which led me to think that it may be possible to hook up the Windows Azure Command Line Tools in my IDE.

He shows how to add a new "framework" to the IDE for the Azure CLI tools and how to get to a command line from inside the editor. From there you can execute any of the Azure CLI calls just as you would outside of the IDE (like his example, creating a new site called "GroovyBaby").

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new article posted that has a review of PHPStorm, an IDE from JetBrains that focuses on providing a great experience for PHP developers and tons of features.

It's said the tool doesn't make the craft - a carpenter can drive a nail into a wooden plank using a hammer, a rock, another plank, or his forehead, but he'll rarely choose anything other than the hammer. [...] I'm talking about using a text editor versus using a full-fledged PHP-dedicated project-oriented IDE for PHP application development. Both will get the job done, but productivity-wise, one is obviously a better choice than the other.

Bruno Skvorc goes through a brief summary of what the editor is about and talks about some of the more notable features including:

• Being built on Java (good and bad)
• The IDE being strictly project-oriented
• Supports the latest PHP version, including 5.4
• Smart refactoring
• Good intellisense support

He also mentions the plugin architecture that's included with the product and a few of the more handy plugins available. They're also running a giveaway in collaboration with the PHPStorm folks and are giving out IDE licenses and copies of SitePoint's "PHPMaster: Create Cutting Edge Code" book (rules are included in the article).

If you've been working with PHP for any length of time, you know that one of the issues the language has shows up when you're trying to debug your applications. Thankfully, as Juan Treminio points out, there's a better way - Xdebug.

Xdebug is a PHP extension that was written and is maintained by Derick Rethans. It provides debugging and profiling capabilities, although I'll be mostly focusing on the debugging aspects in this tutorial. With it you can set a breakpoint and pause the execution of a script to see the state of your application at that exact point, including what variables/objects have been instantiated and what their values are. Xdebug completely replaces the need to litter your code with echo, print_r() or var_dump() calls, and displays information on all variables, not just the one you passed.

He talks some about the current state of IDE/editor support for the tool and shows how to get it installed and your php.ini configured to use it. XDebug make it easy to turn on/off debugging thanks to a handy browser-based switch. He links to a bookmarklet you can use to make it a one-click operation. He includes the setup for using the debugging in PHPStorm, but it's pretty similar for most of the IDEs out there.

James Fuller has posted some of his thoughts about the state of IDEs for PHP (text editors too!) and some of his recent experiences trying to find one that fits his needs.

I think the first "IDE" I ever used for web development would have to be Adobe Dreamweaver (nee Macromedia). Ok, so maybe it was Microsoft FrontPage, but that shouldn't really count. [...] This post is about my experience moving away from the oft-maligned program and some lessons learned in my quest for the perfect IDE.

He tried out several options including Netbeans, Eclipse (PDT), Sublime Text 2 and one he found the most appealing, PHPStorm.

Looking back I realize that IDE's have been a constant annoyance and yet have prompted so much growth and development in my skill level. [...] I also think that the problems I have ran into with IDE's are true about software in general. We search for better solutions and always fall short.

In this recent post to Reddit.com, the question is asked "Where can I find a free place to edit PHP code and see the results?"

Hey everyone, Recently I was tasked with coming up with some code for an possible job opportunity. I'm wondering if anyone could point me to a place where I can easily write and edit PHP code and see the actual program run.

Suggestions from the comments include:

• Codepad.org
• Ideone.com
• The built-in webserver for PHP 5.4.x
• Ignite.io

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.