Cross Platform PHP Development With Or Without An IDE

PHPstorm 3.x

I have a confession. I love a good text editor. At the moment I'm on two platforms: Windows 7 and OS X Lion. I would prefer to use a cross platform solution for web development. That makes most sense. I also love Textmate. But recently I've been flirting with Sublime Text 2, which takes a lot of inspiration from Textmate. But it's cross platform, and pretty awesome.

I'm into PHP development and I've gotten to the point where I need a development tool that can handle proper PHP debugging. I've spent a couple of days reading things on the net and trying various solutions. So far I've checked out Netbeans 7.1, PHPstorm 3.0, Komodo Edit, and Eclipse PTD. I've played with some of these before, but never for a sustained time. All of these IDE's are butt ugly in my opinion. I guess I'm picky. I know, you can get used to ugly coding environments with time. I used to love Windows XP at one time, after all. I'm not going to go into too many details here, but I found that Netbeans 7.1 and Komodo were better than Eclipse. But I think of the IDE's out there for PHP it's hard to beat PHPstorm 3.x. It reminds me of visual studio in a lot of ways, except snappier.


Anyhow, I would really rather use a good text editor. So I decided to look around for a solution. I noticed that Notepad ++ has a plugin that can turn it into a PHP debugger! I know. Notepad ++ is a nice text editor. My main reason for shying away from it is that it's Windows only.

Sublime Text 2.x

I did find a little debugger that runs xdebug and works as a standalone debugger. I haven't tested it extensively, but it looks like a possible solution if you want to use Sublime or another text editor. Of course, it's not going to have all of the tools that you'll find in PHPstorm, for instance.

On the Mac side, I think there are more options, thanx to MacGDBp, which is a standalone debugger for PHP. There are an number of solutions that people have written about using MacGDBp and Textmate.


So, I think I'm going to work with Sublime Text and PHPstorm as my main tools, since both are cross platform, both are in active development, and both are brilliant development tools. I also like the idea that when I need to jump on a Linux box I can brings these tools with me.