I’ve just been to a very interesting BOF by Ludovic Champenois at JavaOne about the new PHP support in NetBeans. The talk was in the context of the new OpenSolaris WebStack so some time was spent on this, including the unique DTrace functionality which looks neat, but I found the NetBeans demo the most interesting.
NetBeans has great support for Ruby and JavaScript and now PHP is starting to get some of that goodness too. At the moment it is only available as either an Early Access release with just the core PHP stuff or in NetBeans trunk (6.5) but it looks very promising. It has:
- code completion
- PHP documentation
- variable renaming
- source navigation
- goto type
- extensible templates and auto-comments
- integrated debugging with XDebug
Sure, you don’t get all the neat refactoring you can have with a statically typed language like Java but even just the variable/method/class renaming is a big help. The code completion is good and the navigation even works over the filesystem in ‘require’ statements. Debugging works just like normal NetBeans debugging including all the usual stuff like call stack, mouse-over variable values, step-in/out, etc. A JMaki plugin brings all that goodness as well.
It’s still fairly early days but it looks pretty neat and maybe PHP finally has a good open source IDE.
[…] hier gelesen, das Netbeans wohl in der Version 6.5 PHP-Support bekommen wird. So richtig mit allen […]
Thanks for trying out our early access release! We’re still gathering feedback about the good, bad, and ugly (ex. better code completion) to make 6.5 a solid PHP IDE, so if you have any comments please do drop me an email. Cheers.
[…] first blogged about the PHP support in NetBeans at JavaOne this year. At that stage it was only available as an Early Access release and was a […]
[…] seems I’m not the only one who thinks the new PHP support in NetBeans is pretty […]