@phpdeveloper.org
We mentioned briefly in a post a while back about the latest offering for those PHP developers out there that were looking for a more robust shell to work in. One has been developed by Jan Kneschke and in this new post from the Zend Developer Zone, it's compared to two other offerings, all going for the same goal.
I started my programming career (many moons ago) coding in FoxPro. [...] In the FoxPro command window I can execute commands, instantiate objects, explore properties; in short, just about everything I can do in FoxPro itself. It's a great prototyping tool for all the non-visual stuff. I’ve missed the immediacy of the command window in every other language I've worked in. I no longer miss it in PHP!
There's mention of the default interactive shell (with the --with-readline) that comes with PHP5 installs, but it's just not as full-featured as many would like. Thankfully, there are three alternatives presented - php_shell, phpa, and phpinteractive. For each, there's a bit of a description and some of Cal's opinions on how well they work.