Design, Develop and Deploy PHP Web Applications with NuSphere PhpED 5.8 and Nu-Coder 2.0

In the past couple of years the world of PHP Editors and IDEs has changed dramatically. Latest releases of NuSphere's PhpED and Zend Studio in our opinion define the standards that any professional PHP IDE needs to live up to and often fails. Long gone the times when PHP Syntax color highlighting was the feature separating PHP IDE from just an editor. These days, even having PHP debugger integrated in your IDE will not do it. While core PHP support features are still an absolute must have, Web 2.0 is here and PHP developers are looking for one editor to help them code PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS. When it comes to debugging of PHP scripts, PHP IDE is expected to provide step-through debugging when the request comes from Ajax call or from Flex or JavaScript injection. From this perspective we looked at NuSphere's PHP IDE latest release - PhpED 5.8

First thing first - we want our PHP Editor to be fast, helpful, configurable and, well, nice! PhpED's claim to fame has always been the triumvirate of "The fastest Editor, The Friendliest GUI and The Best PHP Debugger". More often than not they do live up to the expectations :

Fast PhpED is! We have to admit - it is seemingly faster than other IDEs we tried. We actually asked them how do they do it - they told us things we could have guessed ourselves and were kind of shy to talk about the things we were dying to know. But we could see how PhpED scans the files in the project on startup (only once!) to probably build some cache used by their Code Intellisense.
Speaking of Code Intellisense - code completion hints, picking up the most edge cases (nested PHP Classes and methods, dynamically assigned PHP variables) - all worked to our satisfaction.

While PhpED offers a number of features that should make coding easier, the one we found the most useful is Code Navigator, that actually operates in 4 modes - PHP, HTML, JavaScript and CSS. After playing with few PHP and JavaScript files we concluded that the functionality available in PHP mode is superior to all other modes.

In the past when we reviewed earlier versions of PhpED we always started with the debugger. For our readers not familiar with PhpED - this is the feature that we are the most bullish on. You can step through the code running both locally and remotely (the latter is only available in Professional edition) , look at the variables, set the watches and do clever things to debug your Ajax calls - as we described here: http://www.php-editors.com/articles/debugging-php-json.php

Now, what about Web 2.0 stack? Having taken a look at PhpED 5.8 we noticed that NuSphere's team has come a long way from pretty much rudimentary support for languages other than PHP in versions 4.x and early 5.x to providing Code Navigators for JavaScript, HTML and CSS as well as some Code Intellisense for these elements of Web stack. HTML, JavaScript and CSS navigators bring back nice memories of Homesite (at least for one of us!). Certainly, PhpED 5.8 makes it finally possible to code the entire web application in one IDE.

What is still lacking? Here is the list of things we would like to see:

• Code Completion for JavaScript - definitely would be the strongest feature.
• Ability to assign attributes and names of the elements in Code Navigator for HTML and CSS would probably make PhpED Web 2.0 stack a true heir to Homesite (did you figure that we liked Homesite?)
• Better Code completion for HTML

Overall we were quite impressed with PhpED 5.8. They free trial is absolutely worth downloading: http://www.nusphere.com/download.php.ide.htm
While at it you should take a look at NuSphere's PHP accelerator (PhpExpress) and encoder (Nu-Coder - see our review at http://www.php-editors.com/php-tools/php-encoder.php).