Netbeans IDE – a new star(t) for PHP developers

Recently Sun Microsystems updated there Netbeans branch of Integrated Development Environment (IDE) software to version 6.5 and introduced native support for PHP for the first time. Historically Netbeans has been first choice for JAVA-decelopers,  but now made the move to the broad pool of PHP developers. How stiff is the competition Eclipse PDT or PHP-Eclipse, the other main open-source free IDE’S, are facing?

Main features of NetBeans:

  • Strong integration with PHP as realtime syntax checking, a PHPDoc implementation, code-autocompletion, which also integrates with used defined classes.
  • Version subcontrol: NetBeans offers support for Subversion, Mercurial en CVS out of the box.
  • Database manipulation tools NetBeans offers native access to  MySQL databasesto create tables, update records etc. No need for phpMyAdmin, although ceretain tasks are faster done with the old favorite management tool.
  • CSS and Javascript integration. Offers Javascript debugging and native support for the prototype, DOJO, MOOTOOLS, and JQUERY libraries.

New features as support for SFTP and frameworks like Drupal or Symfony are coming very soon.

First impression is good: intuitive, reasonable speed and feature rich. CSS, HTML and MYSQL support is better than in Eclipse, although Aptana plugins can help.

Try it out yourself:
Netbeans

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 6:00 pm and is filed under MySQL, PHP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Netbeans IDE – a new star(t) for PHP developers”

  1. khakman Says:
    December 15th, 2008 at 11:44 pm

    Also–just an FYI, Aptana’s support for PHP just went 1.0 as of Dec-11-2008 (two days after this post). So now’s a good time to take a look at Aptana PHP too: http://www.aptana.com/php

    PHP is also supported in Aptana Cloud, an on demand scalable hosting and application lifecycle management service integrated right into Aptana Studio. Nothing else out there has that level of end-to-end integration for PHP.
    Check it out at http://www.aptana.com/cloud

  2. Peco Says:
    January 29th, 2009 at 4:51 pm

    I’ve tried a lot of IDEs and I loved Zend Studio 5.x for a long time.
    But Netbeans is my number one since many months now. It’s suits perfectly my needs and offers many cool features.

    Definitely worth a look or two 😉

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