In a recent post to the PHP-GTK Community site, there's a new presentation on code completion for PHP-GTK in Netbeans (illustrated here).

Jose Antonio Bayona Medina has put up a slideshow demonstrating how to use the basic technique outlined in this chapter to add PHP-GTK 2 autocompletion in Netbeans 6.7.

You can see the presentation in the post or head over to Slideshare and check out this and other presentations by Jose Antonio Bayona Medina about more PHP-GTK work and code completion.

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.

In a new post to his blog Davey Shafik goes on a bit more about NetBeans which is quickly becoming his favorite IDE in the series of ones he's tried (including Zend's offering, Eclipse with PDT and his most recent choice NetBeans).

And let me tell you, Netbeans 6.8 is nothing short of amazing. Debugging with xdebug is now almost as easy as ZDE, it works instantly on 90% of my remote machines, but I have 1 cluster for which Netbeans simply *cannot* find the local source file, making it impossible to debug.

Watches, breakpoints (though, I haven't figured out conditional breakpoints, if they are there), callstack and local variables work as you would expect (though watches/variables sometimes refuse to populate larger vars, I think this is xdebug config related). In addition, Netbeans supports arbitrary breakpoint groupings; these can be enabled and disabled as a group - very neat.

He points out the excellent PHPUnit support the IDE has to offer and includes some screenshots of how you can run tests right inside the IDE, displaying code coverage information both at the file and line of code level.

The NetBeans team (Sun) has recently announced namspace support or PHP development in their IDE. They've also just posted a screencast showing how this new functionality works.

We've now finished a screencast demonstrating PHP 5.3 namespace support in NetBeans IDE 6.8. (See Code Completion for Namespaces part I). The screencast also shows code hints for assigning variables, namespace naming hints, and how to set the options for PHP code completion.

You can check out the screencast in the bog entry or directly. You can find out more about the NetBeans IDE at Sun's NetBeans for PHP website.

On the Code Beach blog there's a recent post comparing a few of the more popular IDEs that you can write your PHP applications in (not all specifically targeted at PHP, of course).

This is a roundup of the available PHP IDEs both free and commercial. You will find a wide range in pricing (free to $400) and options available on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X including PHPAnywhere which is a web-based IDE.

IDEs in the list include:

• NuSphere PhpED
• PHPEdit
• Dev-PHP
• Komodo Edit
• PHPanywhere

Samuel Folkes has posted a few of his ideas on the tool(s) that every PHP developer needs to have on his belt to make their work easy and more effective.

Quite often, I am asked the question "What tools do I need for PHP development?". [...] For those who will listen, I have one very simple answer to that question: Aside from a server running PHP and a text editor, you need absolutely nothing. That answer may seem extreme but its the truth. Lets break it down.

Samuel suggests that, while the choices for IDE, debuggers and other tools for PHP development are too many to count, nothing is as good and clean as a basic text editor (his choice is Notepad++). There are a few things that can make your code more effective like phpDocumentor or PHPUnit, but those are more about good coding practices than how you develop.

On PHPBuilder.com today Scott Clark has posted a review of the Aptana IDE (that supports not only PHP but others like Javascript, CSS, Javascript, etc).

I'd read some articles and news items about Aptana Studio Pro, and after reading that it was not only a PHP IDE, but also a full-featured scripting language editor, I had to give it a look--after all, it's free to download, and I'm always looking for a better hammer for my programmer's toolbox. In this article we'll take it for a spin and let you know how it worked out!

He talks about the installation, some of the features it offers for working with non-PHP languages and a few of the quirks he found in creating his first project. You can find out more about the IDE on the Aptana website.

In a new post to the php|architect blog Marco Tabini asks the developers out there "are IDEs still relevant" in your development practices?

PHP developers are firmly entrenched in two camps: those who use text editors, and those who prefer the added power-at the cost of added complexity-that IDEs bring to the table. What's your take?

He looks at some of the more traditional IDE options - Zend Studio, Komodo, Aptana - but also mentions some of the "hybrids" like TextMate or vim that allow you to interface with other external applications to perform common actions (like FTP or debugging). Be sure to cast your vote on your editor of choice while you're there.

If you've been shopping around for a new IDE to use in your development, you might want to check out this new article from NETTUTS.com showing eighteen popular IDEs for several different platforms (Win/Mac/Linux).

Last week we looked at 22 Neat Editors for Windows. But sometimes, a code editor simply isn't enough, especially when you're working with things like databases and classes. Which IDE will you prefer? Hopefully you'll find it below!

IDEs that made the list include:

• Visual Web Developer
• PHPEdit
• Expression Web
• Coda
• Eclipse
• Aptana Studio

The only topic more heatedly debated in the PHP world than which framework is the best is each developer's choice of IDEs. Hasin Hayder lists several popular choices and some of his thoughts on each.

Hmm, tough question for me. i have (had actually) so many favorites depending on context. but definitely it's interesting to write here about them.

IDEs mentioned include Visual Studio 6, NetBeans, Aptana and nano.