In this new post to his blog today, Tim shares some of the tools that he uses to develop his PHP applications (including supporting the CodeIgniter project).

I've been asked on several occasions to spill the beans on my development environment. Sadly, it's probably not the easiest setup - but it works for my stubborn mind.

Applications included in his list are things like PHP Eclipse, CuteFTP, XAMPP and Subversion. He also mentions a Firefox extension, Devboi, that offers quick access to several different reference manuals on the web.

The Zend IDE project has met with some different kinds of receptions, but overall, the preview release seems to show promise. The PHPEclipse project has been around a bit longer, but hasn't really caught on. To compare the two, Florian Anderiasch thought he'd take his own look and see how they compared with each other and how they matched up with his expectations.

I've felt the need to both test both the Zend IDE and phpeclipse and so I made a little thing for practice and to fiddle around a bit.

Just a very quick and rudimentary roundup, but imho especially an IDE shouldn't get in the programmer's way and do just what it should be - aid development.

He mentions being surprised and impressed by PHPEclipse, while left a bit cold by Zend's offering ("I wasn't able to work with a file of just 500 lines because it felt more frozen than sloppy"). His personal choice for larger projects? PHPEclipse.

Carsten Lucke has posted an update on the php-tools blog about a new release for their PEAR package Date_Holidays.

The past weekend Stephan spent some time to fix all filed bugs for Date_Holidays. The result was the release of version 0.15.2. Meanwhile I finally managed to install all the tools on my new MacBook I needed for PHP development.

As I coded a bit to test the features PHPEclipse offers I implemented a feature-request for Date_Holidays that allows to create drivers not only by a unique driver-id, but also by using an ISO3166 country code (i.e. "de" or "deu").

The post also mentions some of the tools that he's installed to do development work on this package, including PHPEclipse.

Based on a post from the Eclipse PHP newsgroup, the ThinkPHP blog has posted about the possible integration of XDebug with the PHPEclipse project.

They also make mention of the two Eclipse projects in the PHP community - the Zend PHP-IDE project and the older, but still being developed on PHPEclipse project.

PHPEclipse currently seems more open to community contributions than Zend's PHP-IDE project. On the other hand Zend's working more closely together with the Eclipse Foundation on the PHP-IDE project than the PHPEclipse project does.

DevArticles has conntinued their "Deploying your Site with PHPEclipse" series with this new tutorial - part two in the series, a continuation of the excerpt of the "PHPEclipse: A User Guide" from Packt.

Part two picks up right where the previous entry left off - working with the settings for Ant to configure the site's deployment. They show you how to create the classpath and a build file for your site before showing you how to run it and do some testing.

They also look at one of the other tools that Ant has to offer to make managing your site that much simpler - the Outline view in Eclipse. It lays out the publishing "schedule" in one easy place.

On his blog, Sebastian Bergmann has a quick post about the PHPUnit support that he's been shown in an upcoming patch to the PHPEclipse project.

Steven Balthazor sent me a first version of his PHPUnit integration for PHPEclipse today.

The PHPUnit part of this (a TestListener that communicates via a socket with Eclipse) has been committed to CVS. Stephen will make his plugin code available shortly.

You can grab the update to your PHPUnit install from that CVS location, but keep an eye out for the patch to make its way out - they're both required to get it working.

With an excerpt from the Packt Publishing book "PHPEclipse: A User Guide" (Shu-Wai Chow), DevArticles has posted this first of a two part series looking at the use of phpEclipse to help with the deployment of your site.

Eclipse simplifies the process of deploying your site to a web server. You can even use Ant, traditionally thought of as a Java tool, to help you in the deployment.

Once again, Eclipse simplifies our work by including several tools that aid us in this process.

The key to deployment in Eclipse is the export function. Eclipse gives us many options in exporting our site. First, we will look at FTP, an old and common method of moving files.

They cover how to set up an FTP site inside the editor, making it a simple process to upload any chnages you've made instantly. They also discuss other methods like SFTP, WebDAV, and Ant support the client can adapt itself to. There are screenshots along the way to help you through each step, including some from other operating systems where the setup might be a bit different.

Sebastian Bergmann has a new post on his blog today that mentions the ever-growing demand he's seeing for the intergration of PHPUnit into the numerous PHP IDEs out there (such as PHPEclipse).

I offered the PHPEclipse development team help in developing proper support for PHPUnit in the past, to no avail so far. I also talked to the developers of Zend Studio about PHPUnit support for their IDE. Hopefully the next version will support it, we'll see.

Over the last couple of years I did several presentations at conferences as well as workshops, consultings and trainings on PHPUnit where I was asked by developers who are using PHPUnit (to test business critical banking applications, for instance) why I do not support any IDE. My answer to this has been, and still is, that while I develop PHPUnit I don't have the time, and in the case of Zend Studio, for instance, not even the means, to integrate it into IDEs. For this I depend on the support of the IDE vendors.

He also mentions that if there are any of the IDE developers out there that would like to help him on the matter, to let him know...

From David Ramalho's blog today, he takes a look at not how to write PHP, but how he writes PHP - focusing mainly on the tools he uses, especially Eclipse.

Friends, I'm sure the post would be a heck of a lot funnier if instead of "How" I would write "Why", but I'm sticking to "How" for...now.

He says some about what Eclipse is and how it can be extended, specifically mentioning the PHPeclipse Project.

The PHPeclipse project aims to create a full featured PHP IDE with features like internal PHP parser, debugger, code formatter, outline view, templates and much more.

There are also a foew other tools he mentions: a Subversion plugin, XMLBuddy, and the JSEclipse plugin...

In this new article from the IBM developerWorks site today, there's a look at doing some debugging with the help of a debugger extension for Eclipse - PHPExclipse.

This article details various methods for debugging PHP applications, including turning on error reporting in Apache and PHP, and by placing strategic print statements to locate the source of more difficult bugs through a simple example PHP script. The PHPEclipse plug-in for Eclipse, a slick development environment with real-time syntax parsing abilities, will also be covered, as well as the DBG debugger extension for PHPEclipse.

step you through the installation, how to turn on the error reporting correctly, and how to use the real-time features in Eclipse to make your life easier. Throw in the internal debugger, and you just about have a match made in heaven...