The Midstride Solutions blog has posted five tips and tools that can help to make you a better developer (and possibly make you a faster one).

In this post, I will discuss 5 tips and tools that the php community has provided to speed up development time and improve code quality. These should help you out if you don't already know them, but if you do I would like to hear what you use to speed up your development time.

Their five tips/tools are:

• Framework with the Model View Controller (MVC)
• AJAX Frameworks
• Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
• Database Creation/Management Software
• Object Relational Mapping (ORM)

Included for each is his personal preference and recommendation.

Justin Carmony has submitted a post from his blog today that looks at to of the major PHP IDEs - Zend Studio 6 and Eclipse PDT - and compares them on features and functionality.

I've been using Zend Studio (ZS) for the last two years. It is developed by Zend, the company behind PHP. The very first time I used it and it was able to auto-complete my custom PHP classes I was sold. With version 6 of Zend Studio, they integrated Zend Studio with Eclipse, a popular IDE framework. I've been mostly happy with the new version, where as in some areas I felt that things were took a step back.

He compares their ease of installation, how easy they make it to refactor your code, debuggers included, the editor environment itself and, of course, the integration with Zend Platform/Zend Framework.

In a new article from the Builder.com.au website, they give a walk through of how to use the new Delphi version (from CodeGear) in your PHP development.

I recently got the chance to actually try out the product. Here's a brief tour of Delphi for PHP, which I hope will help you bootstrap yourself into the environment. Because many regular readers are already familiar with Visual Studio, and because I am extremely familiar with it, I will be making many comparisons between Delphi for PHP and Visual Studio. Also, I won't spend time discussing the PHP language itself, but I will show how the work in the IDE affects the PHP code underneath.

He includes descriptions of some of the features included in the tool and sprinkles in a few screenshots to help give a better idea of how its all laid out. HE likes it overall but thinks that there might be some PHP developers out there that feel a bit constrained by it since it lacks some features that most editors come bundled with natively.

In a recent quick post Chris Hartjes points out a tool for the Komodo IDE that CakePHP users will find particularly useful.

For those who remember how I was an editor waffler will remember that I play around with Komodo from time to time, and decided to get back into using it again. [...] Now, since I know a few people at Activestate I emailed Jeff Griffiths to ask him a few questions. He responded by hacking together something very quickly for adding code intelligence for CakePHP to your views.

The extension imports the standard CakePHP helpers into view files such as the Ajax, Cache, Javascript, Session and Time helpers.

Alex Netkachov made a happy discovery recently and wanted to share it, so he blogged about it - the inclusion of his suggestion into the nightly build of the PDT extension for Eclipse:

Happy dreams of PHP developers come true. Yesterday I received a letter from Eclipse PDT bugzilla with notification that my proposition about autocomplete for properties that submitted more than a year ago is implemented in PDT 2.0 nightly builds.

There's a screenshot included in the post and he points to the download page where you can grab the files you'll need.

David Van Couvering has posted about some of his experience with the latest version of the NetBeans editor for some of his PHP and Javascript development work.

Yesterday I spent the whole day trying to help a friend in need who had waded in too deep with a contract he has. He has no database experience, and was trying to customize a Wordpress plugin that uses PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. So I downloaded the daily build of the PHP bundle of NetBeans for 6.5 and started working.

He happily notes that things like syntax highlighting, inline documentation and completion were still there in the PHP bundle as well. He also mentions a few other things that could come in handy for the IDE - ssh tunnel support (see here), an "Add Column Wizard" and a "Insert DLL Wizard".

John De Goes (of N-Brain) let us know about a screencast he's posted on Vimeo of how he's set up the UNA Editor (Personal Edition - now free!) to work with PHP.

UNA Personal Edition includes full support for standard features of source code editors, such as syntax highlighting, auto-complete, regular expression search and replace, and external tool integration. [...] UNA Personal Edition allows developers to edit, compile, test, and execute files in any and all languages, and is a nice complement to heavyweight IDEs such as Eclipse and IntelliJ Idea.

The screencast lasts about five minutes and shows the creation of a new PHP project, how to set up a "launcher" to access the PHP online documentation right in the browser, use the built-in syntax checker PHP has (lint) and execute the current file.

The PHP-GTK Community Site has posted some information (and some files) to help make your editor of choice a bit more "PHP-GTK aware" when it comes to code completion.

These IDEs are able to provide code completion not only for prebuilt extension code, but also for user-level PHP code. This gives us a way to provide it to PHP-GTK developers : all it takes is a "stub" file containing PHP declarations equivalent to the PHP-GTK2 classes, interfaces, and their methods and constants.

Making it by hand would be slow (and not efficient at all) so they opted to let the Reflection API do the heavy lifting for them and generate a Gtk_Dumper output file to hand to your editor and let it parse. The file is available for download.

The PHP::Impact blog has a new post about the release of the latest version of the NetBeans IDE, 6.1.

Feature-for-feature, Eclipse and NetBeans are well matched. In fact, because they are both extensible, any feature gaps between the two can be filled in with third-party plug-ins. Eclipse and Netbeans are rapidly approaching the capabilities of commercial offerings. Most developers won't need more than what these two excellent development platforms provide.

A (very) brief list of the features of the two is also included, their similarities including SVN support and syntax checking.

In a new post on his blog, Guy Harpaz answers a few questions people have been having about the debugger protocol that the PHP IDE project uses.

Debugging a PHP application or a PHP web server requires connectivity between an IDE and a Debugger engine (a PHP module which is installed on the web server). The debug protocol defines this connection. [...] When the Eclipse Foundation approved the PHP IDE project, Zend Studio's debug protocol was opened source and was chosen to be the debug protocol of the PHP IDE project.

He goes through why they made the choice, touches a bit on the security aspect of the two debugging protocols he mentioned (DBGp and Zend Studio's) as well as their common methods for output.