On the Codewall.co.uk site they've posted another tutorial that will help you set up a part of your PHP development environment: XDebug and the IDE NetBeans.

NetBeans is a fantastic free IDE for not just PHP, but other languages like HTML, JavaScript, C++ and more. For PHP it comes highly prepared for being your predominant development environment. It has a whopping list of features that turbo-charge your programming like it’s auto-complete ability to name just one. A PHP development environment isn’t complete unless you have the power to debug the code you write, in this tutorial, you’ll learn how to correctly set that up.

After covering some of the prerequisites they break down the process into a few steps:

• Download XDebug
• Configuring XDebug in the PHP.ini file
• Checking configuration has been activated
• Configuring NetBeans to use the xDebug module

The last step in the process is an example of actually running the debugger and debugging some code with a breakpoint (and the resulting output)

The results are in and the SitePoint PHP blog has officially announced the most popular PHP IDE based on the answers to their survey. The overall winner is PHPStorm (from JetBrains) but several others weigh in on their editor of choice too.

This article will focus on the IDE results alone. We’ll analyze the PHP community in general in a future piece after the data has been cleaned to a greater extent. Please note that these are preliminary results, and not much detailed filtering has taken place yet. The data will still be processed and additionally verified. The ballpark is in the correct ranges, but cannot be deemed precise (might be off by a couple dozen in every category – not enough to influence the end result), hence only percentage values will be displayed in the charts. For exact figures, see the raw data.

The results show PHPStorm coming in at first place in both the business and personal votes with Sublime Text and Netbeans pulling in behind for 2nd and 3rd. The post also shares comments from some of the votes, people adding some of their own thoughts and reasons for their choice of editor/IDE. Other tools that were mentioned include Vi, TextMate, Eclipse/PDT and Dreamweaver.

Kevin Schroeder has a new post for the Netbeans users out there wanting to work with the Zend Developer Cloud directly without having to mess around with other external software.

Getting NetBeans connected to the Zend Developer Cloud is actually pretty simple… if you have NetBeans 7.1 which is currently in RC. NetBeans 7.0 has a bug that won't allow you to connect to Git over HTTPS. NetBeans 7.1 fixes that issue. You will also need to make sure that you have the Git module installed.

His post includes the step by step process (including some screenshots to getting the automated deployment set up and working in this popular IDE. The key is setting up the SFTP connection to point to the right location on the cloud server (the path isn't very intuitive, he recommends finding it with another SFTP program for the initial setup).

In a recent post to his blog Mark Hamlin talks about some of his difficulties in getting XDebug and Netbeans working together from an OSX machine hitting a Ubuntu server.

For the past 18 months working with PHP, i've primarily used alternatives, not out of preference, but because netbeans xdebug integration consistently failed me. It would (might) work with a remote apache, but would not play with scripts executed remotely from the command line. I could be fairly sure my xdebug config was sound as I no problems with MacGDB and PHPStorm whatsoever.

With a little more investigation, he discovered that it was the OSX firewall causing issues. He found that, with a new incoming connection came a confirmation box to approve the connection. This, of course, wasn't passed along to Netbeans so he never saw it. In the end, he set up a reverse SSH tunnel to bypass the firewall completely (command included).

Robert Basic has posted a quick hint for Netbeans users on how they can debug two (interlinked) projects at the same time in the same debugger instance.

I’m currently working on some Symfony2 bundles and I have one Netbeans project for the main Symfony2 app and one project for the bundle. [...] The debugger starts for the "main" project, which is the Symfony2 app, but setting breakpoints with Netbeans (y'know, by clicking the line number) for the bundle doesn’t really work, as those are in the other project and not in the debugged one, rendering the whole debugging useless.

The fix is pretty simple, if a bit manual - simply place xdebug_break calls in your code anywhere to tell the debugger to stop there. It's not as friendly and automatic as just clicking in the IDE, but it gets the job done. For more information on Xdebug, see their site.

In this quick post today Robert Basic shares a hint for using Xdebug together with Zend Framework unit tests to get effective results.

I've spent this weekend hacking on some unit tests for ZendDojo and I ran into an issue where I need Xdebug to, well, debug. Note, that this is not for debugging a Zend Framework application, but for debugging Zend Framework itself. I am using Netbeans + Xdebug to debug regular code, but debugging unit tests was something completely new for me. Turns out, it’s not entirely different from "regular" debugging.

Thanks to hints from this post and some trial and error on working with autoloading, he finally got things working in his Netbeans environment. The trick is setting up the "Index File" to the correct location.

In a new post to his blog Sasa Stamenkovic compares two of the most popular IDEs PHP developers are using these days - Eclipse and NetBeans and how they stack up on various criteria including configuration, navigation, version control support and debugging.

I was happy Eclipse fanboy for quite a long time, and I can say that I still am. I like to try out new things, but this IDE was doing perfect job and I stick to it for PHP development. But few months ago I have tried NetBeans 7.0, and boy, after few hours it felt like home. At the end of the day, with all respect to Eclipse, I decided to switch. I will try to compare this two, but before we start I must say that they are both very good at what they do, and no matter which one you choose it will do great job for sure.

He includes descriptions and screenshots for quite a bit of the features, comparing the interfaces as well as the bundled functionality for the following:

• configuration options
• code completion abilities
• general application navigation
• code formatting abilities
• version control support
• debugging integration
• testing support (unit tests, etc.)
• plugins
• and perfomance

Rafael Dohms has, in a recent post to his blog, shown how to set up NetBeans to use PHPUnit tests with XDebug. This allows him to run his unit test and track down problems with the handy XDebug extension right from his IDE.

Every now and then you run into this weird situation in your code, where something that was supposed to zig is now zagging and it makes no sense whatsoever. For me this ends up happening in my unit tests since i’m not running everything in the browser everytime and since my tests usually run more scenarios then a regular browser run, that’s where the weird stuff happens.

He shows you how to configure NetBeans with the path to your local PHP installation, configure the xdebug settings in your php.ini and how to coordinate the PHPUnit install to send its output to your NetBeans instance. Then it's as simple as clicking "Debug" on the project and running "phpunit-debug" from the command line.

As mentioned by Chris Jones today, the Oracle Technology Network has posted a few new tutorials in their "Oracle By Example" series. Two of them deal with using PHP and the 11g version of the Oracle database.

The first, Using PHP with Oracle Database 11g, is an introduction to some of the basics of interacting with the database including using connection pooling and tips on query optimization.

The second tutorial, Developing a PHP Web Application with Oracle Database 11g, shows you how to build up a basic company portal with the help of the Zend Framework and the Netbeans IDE.

On the Web Builder Zone there's a recent article comparing one of the PHP IDEs growing in popularity, NetBeans, and one of the standbys of the development world, Vim. It compares how they both stack up for PHP development work by things like features, speed and ease of use.

Since this is an old religion war and it can't be solved out of context, my points will be specifically related to these programs. In this comparison, I collected examples of where Vim and NetBeans differ in behavior and performance. The point of view is that of a PHP developer, since I experienced much worse results with Unix tools while programming in other languages such as Java.

He compares them on a few different levels including overall speed, autocompletion, portability, ease of use, codebase navigation and versatility. There's no "better than" judgment here, just a good look at what each tool has to offer. What it really boils down to, of course, is personal preference. These are just two of the many possibilities out there (like PHP Storm, Eclipse PDT or Zend Studio).