On the Developer Tutorials blog today, Akash Mehta has posted the second part of his look at the "ultimate web development environment", a continuation from this previous part.

Today I'm going to look at a local development server and its PHP configuration, as well as some of the IDEs/editors available for Linux, especially the cross-platform options.

Tools mentioned this time include things like a local development server (invaluable) some PHP configuration tips and the editors they mentioned, things like Aptana, Eclipse and Zend Studio.

On the O'Reilly PHP blog (ONLamp.com), there's a new post by Michael Ross with an overview of the popular PHP IDE from Zend, their Zend Studio for Eclipse:

Zend Studio for Eclipse is the company's latest update of its PHP IDE, and carries a version number of 6.0. As a foundation, it uses Eclipse, an extensible open source platform for software development that is growing in functionality and widespread usage every year. It also utilizes the PHP Development Tools (PDT) framework.

He looks at the product from all sides - the releases of the products, requirements, pricing, installation and an overview of the interface (complete with screenshots). He also mentions other features that come bundled with the editor like testing integration, file/version management and a built in debugger (as well as special support for the Zend Framework).

Debugging can be one of the most important tools to a developer (web or otherwise) and one of the more popular PHP IDEs, Zend Studio, makes it relatively simple to do. The Developer Tutorials website has this new tutorial to help you get started on the path to being bug free.

For the majority of experienced PHP developers, Zend Studio is considered the top-of-the-line PHP IDE. [...] In this tutorial, we will explore how to use the latest update of Zend Studio for debugging PHP scripts.

They walk through an overview of the IDE, some of the requirements and the install process and, finally, they finish it off with a few pages talking about how the get the debugging up and running.

Vinu Thomas has linked to an article from Micah Carrick talking about the customization of the gedit IDE to be more useful for web developers.

As a web developer and programmer, I prefer to use a powerful text editor over WYSIWYG software. I write code using HTML/XHTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Ruby, etc. The standard text editor that comes with GNOME is much more powerful than you may know. This article is written to illustrate how you can configure gedit for use as a powerful, stable web developer’s text editor.

The article is broken up into a few different sections - a list of the features the gedit has to offer, some of the preferences that you can customize, a description of the plugin system and a listing of some of the external tools (plugins) that can be added for additional functionality.