Best IDE for PHP autoindent?

rolf, allow me to add to your requirements... What's a good IDE that allows for easy debugging (stepping into the code and monitoring values... etc) of PHP?

@Kassem: Eclipse, Apache, Xdebug

Zend Studio (by the Zend company, the PHP Gods)

arithma wrote@Kassem: Eclipse, Apache, Xdebug

Eclipse is the only IDE I've heard of among those three. Thanks :)

MrClass wroteZend Studio (by the Zend company, the PHP Gods)

Looking at the features of Zend Studio, $300 per license is not much at all.

I would recommend Netbeans, also keep an eye on PHPStorm (seems really cool! and you get 30 days trial).

P.S: What you have mentioned above are not "IDE"s. :-)

Kassem wrote

arithma wrote@Kassem: Eclipse, Apache, Xdebug

Eclipse is the only IDE I've heard of among those three. Thanks :)

I mean you should use eclipse, with apache for your server side, and xdebug on top of apache so that you can step into and debug your php code. Netbeans works just as well.

Kassem wrote

MrClass wroteZend Studio (by the Zend company, the PHP Gods)

Looking at the features of Zend Studio, $300 per license is not much at all.

zend is junk(zbeleh :P), it is too much of a resource hog last time i tried it. It is eclipse based, but other perspectives are much better than it.
Netbeans is not bad, phpDesigner is not shabby either.

As for debugging, i still find var_dump/die the best solution to your debugging needs, much faster than debugging using xdebug, but hey i could be wrong, it is been a while since i tried it

I use var_dump/die as my sole mean of debugging. As for text editing, call me old fashioned but I believe Vim is the best thing to ever exist when it comes to autoindentation. (As well as any advanced text manipulation feature you want).

Yep. I do find stepping through code a bit superfluous in web requests since they life for so little time anyway. But hey, the tool exists, and it's there for our use just in case we need it. I hardly ever consider it a necessity, just something nice to know is out there.
Stepping through code becomes more important when you have a long living context and you need to inspect your environment for any corruption, as a sample scenario.

Emacs. /discussion

Seriously, you should invest time to master a superior text editor that could be used as an IDE. At first, you will hate everything, you'll wonder why. Keep at it, a month or 2 later, you won't be able to use any other text editor or IDE and the productivity boost that you'll get is simply cannot be comprehended! As a fellow lebgeek, I strongly advise you to get Emacs a try for at least 2 weeks.

proners wrote

arithma wroteYep. I do find stepping through code a bit superfluous in web requests since they life for so little time anyway. But hey, the tool exists, and it's there for our use just in case we need it. I hardly ever consider it a necessity, just something nice to know is out there.
Stepping through code becomes more important when you have a long living context and you need to inspect your environment for any corruption, as a sample scenario.

<insert functional programming rant here /> :P

<insert unit testing - TDD rant here /> :P

<insert general rant here /> :P

after those three rants, you'll know that you don't need a debugger :D

functional programming and debugging are not very compatible. This is a point more against functional programming rather than debugging. Debugging is essential.

Are you saying that unit testing is the answer to debugging? Debugging seems to be the much more lower cost solution. Yes unit testing has a lot of merit, but writing a unit test to exhaust all the possible problems you can fall into is "impossible". It's impossible in the simplest of cases, before even entering the realm of parallelism and what not.

Generally, the public loves debugging and relies on it heavily (either by tracing mid execution, or by setting break points, or whatever cunning technique you want to devise).

How do you unit test your unit tests? Do you? Or do you debug them? :)