InfoWorld/DeveloperWorld has posted a list of eight power tools (IDEs) they suggest to any PHP developer looking for something more than just the standard text editors.

In this article, we examine eight IDEs: ActiveState's Komodo IDE, CodeLobster PHP Edition, Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT), MPSoftware's phpDesigner, NetBeans IDE for PHP, NuSphere's PhpED, WaterProof's PHPEdit, and Zend Studio. All of these PHP toolkits offer strong support for the other languages and environments (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL database) that a PHP developer encounters. The key differences we discovered were in the tools they provide (HTML inspector, SQL management system) for various tasks, the quality of their documentation, and general ease-of-use.

There's a summary scorecard on the first page of the article if you want to jump straight to the good stuff, but the pages following that will give you much more information about each of the options - the good and the pad points. According to their overall scores, though, Eclipse PDT and Zend Studio tied it up for the highest rankings.

On the Geekzguru.net site there's a guide posted (from June 13th) about how to get PDT and Flash Builder to let you debug both sides of your application (the Flex side and PHP side) at the same time.

This setup allows you to edit and debug you PHP files along with your flex application in the same instance of eclipse. All features of PDT like PHP code coloring, auto complete will be available in addition to the wonderful features that Flash Builder 4 provides.

They walk you through the installation of the Eclipse PDT software, the XDebug module for debugging your PHP and how to modify your Flex project's files to modify the .project file's XML with a new linked resource.

On his blog today Piotr Walczyszyn has posted a tutorial on getting an Eclipse instance set up with the PHP development tools (PDT) and a Flash Builder plugin to get ready for developing Flex and PHP applications.

In this tutorial I will explain how to configure development environment to work with PHP and Flex projects in one tool. In order to do that I will use Eclipse PDT 2.1 (PHP Eclipse plugin), Flash Builder 4 Plug-in Beta 2 and latest Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers package which is eclipse-jee-galileo-SR1-macosx-carbon (of course if you are on Windows you should get proper version instead) at the moment. Additionally I will use MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP stack), of course there are other possible solutions like WampServer for Windows, multiplatform XAMPP or Zend Server.

He links to all of the downloads for you (much appreciated) and walks you through the installation complete with screenshots and configuration settings you'll need to get things integrated.

Maarten Balliauw has posted about some new tools that Eclipse developers out there can use to develop applications on the Windows Azure platform - the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse.

While working on the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, I had the opportunity to test-drive the development builds of the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse. Today, the project has been released officially at www.windowsazure4e.org. Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse provides a series of wizards and utilities that allow developers to write, debug, and configure for and deploy PHP applications to Windows Azure.

The plugin also includes the SDK to give PHP applications a simple API to interface with Windows Azure. Maarten also points to some beginner tutorials to help you get started.

Recently on his blog Sameer has posted a "first look" at the recently released nWire extension for Eclipse-based IDEs.

Due to various complex PHP applications being developed - like Magento, Joomla and a wide variety of frameworks, developers finds it hard to understand the underlying architecture and relationships between various components within the application. nWire lets you bring order to that complexity.

He looks at the features the tool offers - the visualizer, navigator and searching abilities - and details each of them with a few screenshots showing these features in action.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new post promoting an extension for the Zend Studio/Eclipse IDEs called nWire that allows you to get a better overall view of the structure of your PHP applications.

nWire was designed for developers who get lost in large and complex applications. It dramatically shortens the time it takes to read and understand the code and reduces the learning curve for new developers. [...] nWire was developed with support from Zend Technologies and works with the new Zend Studio 7.0 and Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) with PHP Development Tools (PDT).

The tool includes a visualizer to graphically browse the parts of your application, a navigator to see associations in the code and a quick search that makes it simpler to search the entire project. You can find out more about the project including downloads and a 4 minute intro video on the nWire website.

On the I-Programmer.info blog there's a recently posted tutorial about creating a component for Joomla in the Eclipse IDE (with the PHP development tools installed).

Although there are a lot of good tutorials describing how to create a new component for Joomla it can still be difficult to organise all of the material into a procedure for developing using an IDE and a local test environment such as Eclipse for PHP. So here are some more specific instructions about the whole process with nothing left out (I hope!).

They step through the process - making the Eclipse project, creating the XML definition, packaging it up into a zip file and installing the new package in your Joomla! installation. Sample XML and screenshots are provided to make the component creation easier.

On PHPBuilder.com there's a new article looking at the Zend Studio for Eclipse IDE and testing of the latest version (and a bit of the latest beta) by Marc Plotz

I have been using Zend Studio For Eclipse for over a year now and although I started using it around version 5.5, which was rocky to say the least, I am currently using version 6.1.2. and testing 7.0 Beta--which seems rather promising with its error reporting even extending to Zend Server, should you have that installed as a localhost. Throughout the past year I have become rather attached to "my Zend" and I can honestly say that after trying another (Free) Eclipse based IDE I found myself gravitating back to "my Zend" faster than the "Other One" could uninstall itself.

He talks about the IDE's interface, the installation process and includes some screenshots of the user interfaces for repository browsing and code navigation (and manual reference support!)

On Madarco's DevBlog there's a new post looking at using the new Zend_Tool component of the Zend Framework from inside of the Eclipse IDE.

Zend_Tool is a command line tool released with the latest version of Zend Framework. It will jump-start the development automating some tasks like the creation of an empty project or of a controller class. Other than from the command line, its possible to use Zend_Tool directly from Eclipse, lets see how.

The step-by-step process walks you though a (very) basic installation of the Framework and how to hook Zend_Tool in as an "External Tool". You can then use it, along with a few command-line parameters passed in, to execute all of the Zend_Tool commands as if you were right there on the command line.

Ivo Jansch has a new blog post today looking at a method he's come up with to debug command-line PHP applications in Eclipse PDT with their needed parameters (not as a stand-alone script).

I write quite a lot of command line utilities in PHP and luckily PDT makes it easy to debug command line scripts. The thing with command line scripts is that often they require parameters passed on the command line, and PDT offers an easy way to pass them when you debug a script.

He quickly illustrates (with a few screenshots) how to get the debugger to prompt for the values of the PHP script you've selected. You can also use a similar technique in other Eclipse-based IDEs (like Zend Studio or Aptana).