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.

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).

As mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone today, the group working on the Eclipse PDT extension has been working hard to get the tool ready for PHP 5.3 when its released and are now looking to the community to help them with some testing.

Roy Ganor explains in his blog:

Since Michael has just finished implementing the second phase for PHP 5.3 support in PDT, we can now expose unit tests and ask users to add more cases to the code assist tests repository.

His post includes the basic format for the tests (as written in pdtt, a clone of the phpt format) and a clip from the PDT wiki page about why they need them. There's no automatic way to submit them but if you want more information on the project and testing, you can always send them an email to find out more.

Davey Shafik has put together a list of four of the more popular PHP IDEs offered today - Zend Studio, Eclipse with the PDT extension, Komodo and NetBeans - and posted a comparison table of key features and preferences.

I have continued using Zend Studio 5.5 but have been looking for alternatives as it will not be updated to support new features like Namespaces, Closures and Traits. So far, I have tried Zend Studio for Eclipse/PDT, PHPEclipse (briefly), Komodo IDE and Netbeans. None of them have come close to replacing ZDE except for Netbeans. Below is some requirements and a comparison table for these I have tried so far.

He includes the specifications he's evaluating them on (including cross-platform with Windows, Linux and OS X) and the full list of "yes", "no" and "sort of" for each thing on the list. The criteria include:

• Inclusion of a debugger
• Inclusion of a profiler
• Auto-complete for user code and PHP functions
• Integration of revision control
• Project support
• Customizable interface

Smashing Magazine has put together an article comparing sveral of the popular PHP IDEs on a list of about twenty different features:

Everyone wants to be more productive, make fewer mistakes and write good code. Of course, that all depends on you, but in most cases integrated development environments (IDEs) can help you achieve those goals more easily. Unfortunately, choosing the right IDE is very difficult because a lot needs to be considered. [...] In this post, we'll take a close look at the most popular PHP IDEs, exploring their functions, comparing them in a table and drawing some conclusions.

The article is less about finding the "best of the best" our of the reviewed IDEs and more about helping you figure out which one would be the right fit for you. They compare them in the features they offer - syntax highlighting, navigation, debugging, versioning and more. There's even a handy chart with all of these laid out for each editor they reviewed (PDT 1, PDT 2.0, Zend Studio 6 & Netbeans 6.5).

This press release from Zend talks about the latest update to the PDT (PHP Development Tools) extension for Eclipse - the recent release of version 2.0.

The Eclipse Foundation is pleased to announce a major upgrade to the popular Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) project. PDT is an open source development tool that provides all the basic code editing capabilities developers need to get started developing PHP applications. The focus of the PDT 2.0 release is to add support for the object-oriented programming features of PHP and to improve the overall user experience of the PDT environment.

Improvements in the latest release include a type hierarchy view, override indicators, a new indexing and searching engine, a more sophisticated Code Assist feature and much more.

As Roy Ganor noted in a recent tweet - the long-awaitedversion 2.0 of the PHP Development Tools (PDT) extension for Eclipse has been released:

PDT 2.0 was designed based on principles different to those of Eclipse PDT 1.0. For example, different techniques were used to model workspace projects. PDT 2.0 now uses an indexing and caching mechanism for improved performance and experience with code assist and navigation. Moreover, since PHP provides enhanced Object-Oriented features like inheritance and polymorphism, PDT 2.0 provides enhanced features such as type hierarchy, override indicators and type navigation for programmers who utilize these language properties.

The extension is now lighter and faster, making better use of the Eclipse framework for caching/indexing language elements. The release also includes a method for configuring your buildpath, a "mark occurrences" feature, an icon that notes overrides, improved code assist and much more.

You can grab this latest download from a Eclipse PDT page off of the Eclipse site.

Chuck Burgess has posted a discovery he made while working with Eclipse PDT and a command line script that he needed to debug:

This week, I found a need to do this same kind of remote debugging, but for a command-line PHP script. This seems to be something that Eclipse is not already designed to do, as there is no "perpetual listener" available for its debug client. Instructions for remote CLI debugging are available, which showed me that environment variables might be the missing link to getting it working with Eclipse. It turned out to be one of two missing links. The other link was tricking Eclipse into keeping a debug session open (and therefore "listening").

He found that by loading up the PHP file in a shell script with the XDEBUG_CONFIG and XDEBUG_SESSION variables defined, it allows the Eclipse listener to connect and work through the file like a normal web page request.

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.