What software is used to program PHP?

Are you ready to learn PHP? Then you should first consider what development tool (IDE) to use. There are many such tools on the market, some are paid and some are free, and it is not easy to choose.

If you say that you can use basic text editing software for PHP programming, such as Notepad. Yes, this is absolutely fine for amateurs. However, it is better to choose a development software with rich and complete functions, especially for professional developers. These software are: NetBeans, PHPStorm, VIM, Zend Studio, Cloud9 or Atom.

Good development tools are rich in features and can help developers edit programs quickly and efficiently. It is a basic need for developers. Sharpen the tool and chop wood without missing a beat. Spend some time in advance to choose a suitable development software. This is the best policy.

Which one to choose depends on your needs, preferences and budget. It’s also a good idea to try a few before settling on one.

A large number of PHP development software supports cross-platform systems, can be used for Windows, Linux and Mac, and is available for free download. For beginners, my suggestion is that you can choose a free one as long as it is available. For example: NetBeans, VIM, Atom or Eclipse PDT.

Enterprises and professional developers can use these free development software to complete program editing, but there are also many paid platforms that are favored by enterprise developers because they integrate many of the latest and more advanced features. Just to name a few, such as: PHPStorm, Sublime Text, Zend Studio, Nusphere, PHPED, PHP Designer and Cloud 9, etc.

If you just want to use PHP to make simple applications rather than build an entire system, then you can also try those online PHP development tools, such as PHPfiddle.com. For simpler options, you can choose witephponline.com and ideone.com.

Okay, let’s take a look at 10 excellent development tools recognized by developers around the world. They are feature-rich, popular, state-of-the-art and well-loved.

1. NetBeans – The best PHP IDE (free version)

NetBeans is a PHP IDE for the general public. It is feature-rich, free and supports multiple languages, including English and Japanese. , Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Simplified Chinese. The release date of the free version of NetBeans dates back to 2010, when Sun Microsystems began developing it as an open source project, and later Sun Microsystems became a subsidiary of Oracle.

Since its release, NetBeans has been downloaded more than 18 million times and has one of the largest developer communities dedicated to open source integrated development environments.

In the past, NetBeans was rarely used for Java development, but now, such days are gone. The current stable version of NetBeans is lightweight, faster and fully supported. PHP. Out-of-the-box support for popular PHP frameworks like Zend, Doctrine, Smarty, and Symfony2 and others like Yii, CakePHP, FuelPHP, and WordPress CMS, as well as support for Laravel via the laravel-ide-helper Out-of-the-box support for frameworks.

The key features that put NetBeans at the top of the list are the many code generation tools, such as getter setter generation, code templates, smart code completion, prompts, quick fixes and refactorings, etc. It also supports some basic features, including code folding and formatting, try/catch code completion, and rectangular selection.

When entering the debugging phase, you can use the command line or xDebug locally or remotely. NetBeans PHP editor provides out-of-the-box support for web development including javascript, HTML and CSS. All these features easily make NetBeans the best open source PHP IDE.

To read more about NetBeans please visit the official website netbeans.org.

2. PHPStorm - The best PHP IDE (commercial version)

PHPStorm is a full-featured PHP IDE with the most modern feature set for fast and easy Carry out web development. It is developed and sold by a company called JetBrains. For the past 15 years, JetBrains has been the most beloved company in the development tools market, making writing code easier and more enjoyable.

PHPStorm has good support for major frameworks such as Symfony, Zend Framework, Yii, CakePHP, Laravel and major CMS systems such as Drupal, Magento and WordPress.

Not all web development projects do not have front-end technology. This is where PHPStorm shines. It provides real-time editing functions for almost all front-end technologies such as CSS, Sass, HTML5, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, JavaScript, Stylus, Less and so on. It also supports code refactoring, debugging and unit testing.

In terms of development tools, it provides version control systems, sql databases, composer, remote deployment, vagrant, other clients, command line tools and other functions.

From a debugging perspective, it supports Zend Debugger and Xdebug, as well as local or remote.

PHPStorm is an enterprise-level IDE that requires a licensing fee and is primarily targeted at professional developers, but it is also free for teachers, students or open source projects.

The popularity of PHPStorm can be measured from the fact that many large companies such as Expedia, Yahoo, Cisco, Salesforce and wikipedia have purchased PHPStorm IDE licenses.

You can download the PHPStorm trial version (free for 30 days) at the following address – Download PHPStorm trial version.

If you want to know more about PHPStom, please log in to the official website – jetbrains.com/phpstorm.

3. Sublime Text 3 / PHP IDE

Sublime Text 3 is my favorite one and the candidate for the strongest text editor. It's lightweight, feature-rich, and runs on Windows, OSX, and Linux. The power of the Sublime text editor is achieved through plug-ins and packages.

There are many external packages for PHP available that can help turn this elegant editor into an elegant Sublime PHP IDE. To achieve this purpose some useful packages and some famous ones are needed - package control, Sublime PHP companion, xDebug client - CodeBug, PHPCS, CodIntel, Simple PHPUnit and PHPDoc.

Once you install sublime text 3 as PHP IDE, it will help you to add packages, the sublime text you get is elegant, here it makes your PHP powerful, it is for PHP Development is absolutely easy to use.

About Sublime Text, you can read more here (sublimetext.com).

4. Eclipse PDT

Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools) is another open source option that costs nothing. Eclipse has a large developer community dedicated to developing a variety of plug-ins, allowing Eclipse to have the same functions as any top development IDE such as Storms PHP, NetBeans and Zend studio.

Compared with commercial IDEs, it requires a little more work at the beginning, but the money you save is worth it. Compared with PHPStorm and Zend Studio, Eclipse PDT saves licensing fees is a big advantage. If you are a traditional Eclipse enthusiast, you will feel very comfortable using Eclipse PDT.

Some people will say that Eclipse will be very slow. To be honest, if your system configuration is poor, commercial products will perform better than Eclipse. However, basic laptop configurations now allow Eclipse to run quickly enough without holding you back.

Some key features include: Syntax highlighting, code assist, code formatter, refactoring, code templates ), code navigation, php debugging, syntax validation and has a huge community of eclipse ecosystem to support it.

To get started, you can download the Eclipse package specifically for PHP development, which includes PHP language support, XML editor, Git client and Mylyn.

The software can be downloaded and used under Mac OS X, Windows and Linux systems. You can learn more about Eclipse PDT at - eclipse.org/pdt/.

5. VIM

VIM is an open source text editor licensed under the GPL that can be downloaded and used for free. It is one of the most advanced text editors and very popular within the development community. Facebook engineers had been using VIM to write their PHP code before using their own Hack language.

We know that VIM has many features as an excellent text editor, but when you carefully configure it, it provides no less than a fully mature PHP development environment to suit for your PHP development.

If you are a developer who only likes to work with the keyboard, VIM is suitable for you. It is modular, lightweight and fast.

If you are looking for a PHP IDE under Linux, VIM is what you are looking for and its concept is similar to Sublime Text 3. VIM also requires plug-ins to convert it into PHPStorm or Netbeans. IDE, at first you need to spend a lot of work to configure a large number of plug-ins, but after the final success you will find that everything is worth it.

VIM should obviously be counted as a free PHP IDE. You can learn more at vim.org!

6. Zend Studio

Zend Studio is another first-class commercial PHP IDE developed by Zend Company. Its goal is to become a professional web development tool.

Zend provides comprehensive support for PHP, any one of which helps make PHP development a breeze, and the company has more than 40,000 customers. Some of its key clients include DHL Express, Credit Suisse, BNP Paribas and Agilent Technologies.

Windows, OS X and Linux all provide support for Zend Studio and are compatible with the latest PHP versions including PHP7. Zend Studio's user interface is intuitive and provides a large number of modern features and tools that generally help speed up the PHP and web development process. Some of the key features include-

• Better performance in validating, indexing and searching PHP code.
• Debug using Zend Debugger, Xdebug and built-in Z-Ray tools.
• Supports the Eclipse plug-in ecosystem.
• Supports Docker and Git streaming.
• Supports intelligent code editing for PHP, Javascript, CSS and HTML.
• Deployment support, including cloud support for Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS.
• Integrated Zend server, which facilitates the rapid migration and seamless connection of PHP7.

Zend provides an interesting and powerful feature that supports mobile app development on existing PHP applications and server-side. This function is very useful when supplementary development of existing websites, web apps, and mobile apps is required.

To read more about Zend Studio visit- Zend Studio for PHP.

7. Atom

Atom is a free, modern text editor built by GitHub staff under the MIT license. Atom has formed its own ecosystem within its huge community and has numerous plugins and packages available to extend and define it.

Atom is truly customizable, which means you can turn it into the editor of your dreams with its extensibility and high customizability. In addition, it is also a good choice for truly cross-platform, supporting Windows, OS X, Debian Linux (Ubuntu), Red Hat Linux and Fedora 22.

How to turn Atom into a free PHP IDE?

When it comes to PHP, there are many packages available that can turn the Atom editor into a full-featured PHP IDE. It is not only It's free, and it's as good as many commercial PHP IDEs.

Turn the atom editor into a full-featured Free PHP IDE The packages involved are: hyperclick-php, php-cs-fixer, php-integrator-base, linter-php, atom-autocomplete-php, etc. Here are just a few examples. You can view the full required list on Github -> https://atom.io/packages/search?q=php

For more information please check outatom.io.

8. NuSphere

NuSphere is another company dedicated to PHP development tools. It focuses on the experience of web development. PHPED is the IDE product they provide.

This company is located in Reno, Nevada, USA. Its first PHPED version was released in 2001 when PHP was just developed.

And its latest version of IDE product supports PHP 7 and many PHP frameworks, including Laravel, Yii, Symfony, etc. It also supports Joomla and WordPress in content management systems. Its latest version also adds features that support testing units for traveling local and remote projects.

Overall, PHPED for NuSphere is a full-featured website development tool and includes JavaScript debugging, CSS preprocessing with LESS, HTML5, and of course everything related to PHP.

Even so, I still think that Zend and PHPStorm are more elegant than NuSphere in the commercial field, with better customer support, better documentation and release management.

To learn more about NuSphere please refer to – nusphere.com.

CodeLobster

There is another affordable product called CodeLobster with NuSphere can be said to be evenly matched. In recent updates, CodeLobster has gone very radical. It currently supports almost all PHP products including Twig templates, Drupal, Joomla, wordpress, Yii, Symfony, Laravel, AngularJs, jQuery, Phalcon, smarty, CodeIgniter, CakePHP and nodejs. .

To know more about NuSphere please refer to – codelobster.com.

9.PHP Designer

PHP Designer is another useful IDE , which helps us speed up our web development workflow and provides built-in support for PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. This PHP IDE is only for Windows users. If you are using an operating system such as Mac or Linux, just ignore it.

To read more about PHP Designer, visit PHP Designer.

10.Cloud9-The best PHP cloud IDE

Cloud 9 is a cloud IDE that supports almost all programming languages. In cloud-based programming environments, no cloud IDE can match Cloud9 in terms of functionality and popularity. It provides a built-in PHP debugger for real-time code inspection.

To start, you can use its free version. In this version, you can get a free public space and a free private space. If you want to learn further, you need to purchase a commercial version of Cloud9.

To read more about Cloud9, please visit cloud9.

Conclusion

PHP is the most popular and most comprehensive programming language used in web development. There are many PHP IDEs available from the beginning. From use to development to today, programming methods and PHP IDE have undergone earth-shaking changes.

Most of the IDEs mentioned in this article have different features, but the common goal is to speed up the progress of web development and make the code manageable and scalable. Take a closer look. The article lists some of your key needs. You can choose the one that best suits your needs. There must be at least an excellent PHP IDE under Linux system, PHP IDE under Mac system and PHP under Windows system. IDE.

Let us know about your experience in PHP programming and the best PHP IDE for you through your comments.

Recommended tutorial: PHP video tutorial from entry to proficiency

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