In a new post to his blog Joshua Thijssen gives a guide to how he usually sets up his development environments when working in PHP. It includes working with virtual machines, configuring DNS and setting up his tools to work with it all.

Doing development on multiple projects can be a burden from time to time. One project would be running on PHP 5.3, while another still needs 5.1. Sometimes you need a MySQL server, while on other occasions, you need a NoSQL solution like couchDB or MongoDB together with all kind of gearman functionality. This article shows you how I've setup such a development platform that allows you to quickly create new projects, and still maintain flexibility when you need it.

He uses VirtualBox with either a Debian or CentOS installation as a base platform. He uses Vagrant to set up and configure the machines to make setup almost automatic. He still has to go in and configure a few things like the VirtualHost and DNS settings for the site/application he's working on. Next up is setting up the tools he uses, specifically XDebug and setting up his editor of choice (PHPStorm) for remote debugging.

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.

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.

Karsten Dambekalns has a new post to his blog today about how he was able to get the PHP IDE PHPStorm and XDebug working together to do some debugging in his application.

PhpStorm had it's share of trouble as well [with debugging], but yesterday I experienced a working debug session. Just like that, deep variable inspection and stepping through the code just worked. Today I looked into CLI debugging because Robert needed that for some complicated FLOW3 task. Also works, although it requires one step that should not be needed.

He points out the environment he's using and the two methods/setups he has for debugging - working through the browser and debugging command line scripts with the same tool. Some screenshots are included to help you be sure you're in the right place to change the settings.

Recently Mike van Riel posted a review to his blog of an IDE that's growing in popularity - PHPStorm.

During my career as a PHP developer (hobbyist and professional) I have tried a multitude of IDEs and tools to write code in. Every IDE I have found thus far did great things but had their downsides. It is with phpStorm that I can send at least some of those problems to the past. [...] Having gotten that little push by MissYeh I decided to take a look at that new shiny IDE and found a true gem! phpStorm offers so much more than Netbeans and Eclipse in terms of performance, memory but also functionality.

He talks about some of his favorite features - native git support, a method usage search, more advanced docblock parsing and the ability to view "blame" information right in the IDE. He does note two things to keep an eye out for - the fact that it's still in beta and that, once it's fully released, it won't be free.

On the dailylog blog from lenart.org.pl, there's a quick post talking about a feature of an up and coming PHP IDE - PHP Storm - that's based on the JetBrains platform. He talks about a handy feature that let's you find the difference between your code and what's out in production.

Previously I used ordinary text editor to write the application, but nowadays I thought there should be something better - we have the craft, so with the craft you must have THE tools. The first place I checked was The JetBrains site and they didn't disappointed me - what I found was The JetBrains PHP Storm!

The feature he highlights is the "Compare with deployed version" that lets you, right in the IDE, find the differences between your current code and what's in the repository. No need to flip back and forth between a terminal window and the code. Plus you get a nice visual diff representation to make things even simpler.