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".

On TheServerSide.com (a Java community) there's a post about the latest release of the Netbeans software (version 6.1) and how they've integrated more PHP-ness into it.

The NetBeans 6.1 release is mostly a release of the candidate announced a few weeks ago - definitely a lot of changes in the overall release, with a heavy focus on web services and re-integration of some of the JSF/JPA tooling. However, the PHP platform - a 16MB or so download that provides a PHP-targeted IDE based on Java - is .. interesting.

Comments on the post talk a lot about the other language support for the IDE with only a few mentioning the PHP support (though the ones that do show promising results).

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.

On the Phantom Reference blog there's a post that looks at the integration between NetBeans and PHP via a plugin.

Do you know that you can use NetBeans to build web applications using PHP? PHP plug-in is an extension to the NetBeans IDE that enables you to perform web based development on NetBeans. While there are several PHP IDEs available in the market today, NetBeans PHP plug-in offers the same functionalities offered by other IDEs and then much more. Here is a short note to quickly get you started with NetBeans PHP plug-in in Solaris.

The instructions are pretty adaptable for any OS out there, but you will need a build of NetBeans 6.1 as well as an Apache/PHP instance to configure. The setup is complete with screenshots as well as an example of making a script and running it right there in the application (no web server needed).