InfoWorld/DeveloperWorld has posted a list of eight power tools (IDEs) they suggest to any PHP developer looking for something more than just the standard text editors.

In this article, we examine eight IDEs: ActiveState's Komodo IDE, CodeLobster PHP Edition, Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT), MPSoftware's phpDesigner, NetBeans IDE for PHP, NuSphere's PhpED, WaterProof's PHPEdit, and Zend Studio. All of these PHP toolkits offer strong support for the other languages and environments (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL database) that a PHP developer encounters. The key differences we discovered were in the tools they provide (HTML inspector, SQL management system) for various tasks, the quality of their documentation, and general ease-of-use.

There's a summary scorecard on the first page of the article if you want to jump straight to the good stuff, but the pages following that will give you much more information about each of the options - the good and the pad points. According to their overall scores, though, Eclipse PDT and Zend Studio tied it up for the highest rankings.

In a new post to his blog Brandon Savage asks why some of the best development tools don't seem to be written in PHP.

Trac. CruiseControl. phpUnderControl. Jira. Bugzilla. These are all intensely popular development tools. And not a single one of them is written in PHP. Why? [...] Some might argue that PHP is a lesser language, and thus incapable of producing the results that Python and Java can produce. Others might argue that other languages are more mature. But the truth is that these applications don't exist in PHP simply because PHP wasn't previously capable of producing them.

He expresses a desire to work on some of these tools and to make them native to PHP, but several comments on the post steer him towards some projects that have already done this sort of thing including Xinc, ArbitTracker and sismo.

A few days back Thomas Koch posted a timeline he worked up of the release of several popular PHP quality assurance tools:

Since I'm not a contributor to any QA tool I'll center around the user perspective and the process of establishing these tools in a small to middle web company like YMC. As an outline for the first part I thought to give an historical view on QA in PHP and therefor made a timeline of PHP QA milestones.

He includes both an image of the timeline and the dates as text for the releases of things like PHPUnit, eZ Components, Zend Framework, PHP_Depend and PHPUnderControl.

On the W3Avenue site today there's a list of tools posted that could come in quite handy in your PHP development:

Whether you are a PHP novice or an experienced developer; tools that you use have direct impact on your productivity. W3Avenue has compiled a list of really useful extensions & tools for PHP developers that will help you speed up development and significantly improve overall quality of your code.

They've broken them out into a few different categories - accelerators, build systems, tools applying to code enhancement and correctness, database connectivity, debugging, development/IDEs, security, setup and testing. They also throw in links to a few cheat sheets you can use for quick reference.

In a recent post talking about a library he's developed to interface with Twitter - TwitterData - and some examples of it in use.

I recently created a small library for working with twitterdata in PHP. Sources are available from GitHub: php-twitterdata. Twitter Data is a simple, open, semi-structured format for embedding machine-readable, yet human-friendly, data in Twitter messages. This data can then be transmitted, received, and interpreted in real time by powerful new kinds of applications built on the Twitter platform.

He includes code snippets showing how to connect to Twitter, set up messages to be sent, and grab current messages via the logged in account. You can get full details on the tool from the TwitterData site.

On the Ibuildings techPortal site today Boy Baukema looks at PHPIDS, the PHP intrusion detection system and how it can start to help protect you and your application feel a little safer.

Just a reminder to everyone who is interested in WebAppSec and hasn't done so already to try PHPIDS, the Intrusion Detection System. [...] Installing PHPIDS is easy. Just download the latest version in your preferred format and then review the the FAQ for sample code on how to install it.

He does warn on one thing though - the system is a basic intrusion detection system and is not as complex as other detection tools. There were some complains he had about what it thought were intrusions and recommends that you only have it pointing to the external side of your application to cause less hassle in the long run.

Noupe.com has posted several tips of things you can do to help secure your website and its information.

These "loose ends" are what hackers are looking for, and in PHP, they're not that hard to find. The key is for you to find them first, and to leverage PHP's unique features to minimize your security vulnerability. [...] PHP Security involves minimizing programming errors as much as possible, and putting proper code in place to protect against possible vulnerabilities.

They talk about common types of attacks, some of the PHP-related settings and features that could cause issues (register_globals, bad error reporting levels), and three security tools you can use to get you on the road to safety: PhpSecInfo, PHP Security Scanner and the Spike PHP Security Audit Tool.

As mentioned in this new post to the phpAspect blog, there's a new version of the Aspect PHP Development Toolkit that's been released.

The Aspect PHP Development Tools (APDT) project provides Eclipse platform based tool support for AOSD with PHP. Our goal is to deliver a user experience that is consistent with the PHP Development Tools (PDT) when working with PHPAspect projects and resources. This plugin provides an integration layer between the PHPAspect weaver, runtime and Eclipse/PDT extension points.

The Google Code page for the project has links to more information on the project and, of course, links to the latest downloads.

In a new post to his blog today Justin points out a tool you can use - WApache - to turn your PHP script into a stand-alone executable file.

There are a few commercial products out there that allow you to turn your php scripts into an executable. While most of them work well, I have found a way to do it for free, using an open source application. This application is called Wapache (based on the apache web server) and it is open source (distributed under the Apache License 2.0). WApache doesn't convert your script directly into an executable, it runs on the combination of a windows app (which uses an embedded IE control) and a stripped down version of apache.

The tool acts as a wrapper around the script, making it look and feel like a normal executable Windows file. Your PHP scripts stay intact and can be changed at any time without needing to recompile or anything. There's also some configuration options included that let you customize the interface.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today Manuel Lemos has taken a look at how big the PHP market is - how many developers there are and what kind of tools those developers might be using.

Even knowing that only a fraction of the PHP developers in the world will come to a given PHP event, the more PHP developers there are, greater is the chance to have more developers coming to the event. Therefore the first big question is: how large is the PHP developer community world wide? This is a difficult question. Zend has been publishing rough estimates of the number of PHP developers that exist in the world.

According to some estimates, there's over five million PHP developers out there. The PHPClasses site has this tool that can help show the distribution of some of these in user groups. Manuel also shares some stats he's gathered off of his site - a growing trend for visitors to use Linux and OSX as compared to Windows and the predominance for developers to use Firefox over Internet Explorer.

Other tools mentioned include FirePHP, a Javascript Debugger.