Dittos for PHP and Eclipse (PDT). The reason I bring that up is because
I haven't seen anyone talk about source control, workflow management, or
other such tasks that are quite important to developers. A simple text
editor is great for writing code in isolation of a larger project but
once you start having to manage that project you have to start relying
on external applications whereas many IDE's, such as NetBeans or
Eclipse, integrate that management into a more or less complete package.
IIRC, this thread started because of editing PHP and HTML. I have used
Dreamweaver in the past for PHP and HTML, and I liked it because it was
very visual. But as I got some more experience I realized that the code
that it was generating was, to some degree, un-maintainable. That is
from the days of DW 4 MX and so it might have improved since then, but
back then, the code was not so good (and neither was mine :-)). I know
it's tempting to look for an IDE that does simple drag and drop, but to
make it simple for you it needs to make it complex for the application.
Believe it or not, most of the performance issues for web pages written
in PHP does not come from PHP. It comes from the rendered content or
the database... usually. :-) So, getting to know some of the things
that can cause those problems is a good thing.
So, what am I really saying? I guess that when deciding how to develop
PHP applications, look further ahead than code completion to help you
streamline your tasks. I often use vim for doing quick changes, but if
I'm working on a project I'm always in an IDE (Studio for Eclipse 7.1
beta, on my machine). IDE's do run slower than a text editor, but
unless you know your project line-by-line having that additional help is
often good.
Another reason to use an IDE? Debugging and Profiling. Gotta have it.
PDT has it built in. XDebug can be used with Notepad++, though I don't
know how easy that would be to get it up and running on your i. The
Zend Debugger (free) is included with Zend Core, Zend Server and PDT and
is ready to go.
Kevin
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Vern Hamberg
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 8:07 AM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] What do people use to design web pages for PHP?
Pete: can you give me some guidence?
Hi Tom
Although Notepad++ and things like TextPad have syntax coloring and all,
I've been using NetBeans for awhile and it's really something. You can
get the PHP plugin (?) for it and get really outstanding syntax and
autocomplete and the like that I don't think the glorified text editors
will give you.
Did I say it's free?
Later
Vern
Tom Deskevich wrote:
Pete:
Can you give me some guidance on the software you have recommended?
I now have firefox, firebug and notepadd++ downloaded.
I know the free download I got before (netobject fusion) gave me a
graphical
interface that allowed to drag and drop from a toolbar, but put extra
images
in the HTML that I did not want. Is there such a thing with firebug?
Or is it just an editor for HTML and Java Script? What do you use the
notepadd++ for?
I tried to go through some of the tutorials, but found them confusing.
Maybe
it is too early in the morning.
Here I go with a lot of questions again.
Tom Deskevich
midrange.com
