Any working php debugger, PDT? [closed]

Question

Honestly, I am tired of searching and trying various php debuggers and IDEs from netbeans to jetbrains PHP storm, Eclipse indigo, WAMP, (old zend server community edition) etc! I need a working set of IEDs and debuggers so I can start developing my work!( I by the way want to develop php scripts in Windows) Problems:

• php storm: weird IDE]
• PHP Tools for Visual Studio: it says it is free, but you can try it for free for 30 days
• PDT Eclipse: too old, no updates, broken links. Working with Zend itself is creepy
• Netbeans 7.3, still not easy to work with. So many settings Xdebug not working

I need something like PHP development tools for Eclipse Juno, any suggestions?

What combinations of IDE(netbeans, phpstorm, Eclipse, Visual stodio) + (Zned server, XDebug) do you guys use? I am really tired of this product not being compatible with one another.

Answer 1

I would really give PhpStorm another try. True, it takes a bit of time to get used to, but it offers a lot of features that are hard to find in other IDEs

Regarding debugging and testing, read these walk-throughs on debugging:

http://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/PhpStorm/Zero-configuration+Web+Application+Debugging+with+Xdebug+and+PhpStorm

And unit testing:

http://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/PhpStorm/PHPUnit+Installation+via+Composer+in+PhpStorm

Simple Texteditor

Apart from a proper IDE, I always have a 'regular' text editor 'on the side', for example to have a quick 'scratch' file to write down some notes, or to make minor changes in a file without having to open your entire project.

There are many nice editors, Sublime Text, NotePad++ and UltraEdit are some examples.

Test and development environment

Although using WAMP/XAMP is convenient to set up, it is not the best environment to test your project. Most PHP websites will be hosted on a Linux/Using environment, which is quite different from a Windows environment in many ways, some are:

• Linux/Unix file systems are Case Sensitive, whereas Windows is not
• Linux/Unix uses a slash / as directory separator, Windows uses backslashes \
• Some parts of PHP rely on functionality provided by the operating system. Therefore PHP will produce different results on Windows than on Linux/Unix
• Linux/Unix uses a different permission system

If you develop and test your websites on WAMP you will encounter unwelcome surprises when you try to deploy the website on the actual hosting environment. Some problems may not even present themselves instantly, which will even be worse (customer calling in the middle of your Holiday telling you that the 'flush cache' admin-panel flushed not only the cache, but also all uploaded content)

So, in order to properly develop and test your website, your development environment should match the targeted hosting environment as close as possible

Inform with your hosting provider what their environment looks like; What Linux distribution are they using? (CentOS? Ubuntu?) What versions of PHP, Apache, MySQL?

Set up your test environment according to this. Either by setting up a development server and installing Linux on that, or running a Virtual Machine on your workstation, for example VMWare or Parallels Desktop (a virtual machine may save you some time, because many pre-installed, ready to use LAMP disk-images exist)

Client side testing

Preferably, make sure you have some computers or virtual machines with a clean install of your targeted audience (Windows XP, Vista? etc) sometimes a clean install is missing plugins/functionality that you assumed are present, causing problems (no Adobe Reader installed? No Flash? Old version of Windows Media Player?)

If your targeted audience are business users, be sure to test your website in the actual environment. Think of pitfalls like Caching Proxy Servers, Firewalls, multiple IP-addresses, disabled JavaScript and Thin Clients (using Remote Desktop). Sometimes those environments are still using Internet Explorer 7 (even 6) because of company policy.

Answer 2

Dreamweaver is by far the best php writting tool, the color code is amazing and the auto complete features are irreplaceable. The only other program i have seen come close in the field of auto complete is zend and that lagged like no other. plus it has built in ftp AND it makes it pretty easy to move on to javascript (IMO) As far as server software i personally favorite WAMP, but everyone will have their own preference

you can find dreamweaver(trial) here

Wampp is here (pretty sweet webpage):