PHP Designer 2008
I recently heard about PHP Designer from Boagworld.com. They gave a nice review in one of their podcasts that I’ve started listening to. They made it seem all fancy and cool, and I just had to find out if it was really all that fancy and cool.
Pros
I must say, it feels very nice using it. I personally code in Eclipse, and while very nice, it can be very slow to load, slow to close, slow to tab, slow to… be slow. PHP Designer is real smooth, it opens quickly, there’s no “Workspace closing…” crap when closing it. It’s library of functions for PHP, XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript is wonderful. And I’m pleased with its color coding too. As a web developer, since my whole life is spent looking at code, I want to make it less painful on my eyes. Thankfully, it lets me customize just the way I want, whereas Eclipse was a little more restrictive.
Cons
Sometimes, though, the auto completion gives me blurps when I type exactly what I want and it thinks: “Hey here’s some extra things that function can do” but my mind is already moving on. Requires hitting ESC, unless there’s a way to make it smarter.
Something Eclipse has going for it, is that it’s free. PHP Designer isn’t. Free is a good thing. But I also understand paying for the awesomeness that is PHP Designer.
One other feature I miss from Eclipse (and I haven’t found else where yet, if you, please save me), is the docking of windows however the heck I want. I can split the screen in half, and then split one half into halves, and such, so I can have a tab of my views, and a tab of my controllers. Or perhaps a tab of my HTML, one of my CSS, and one of my JavaScript down at the bottom just chilling. Sure, you can make them not fill the whole screen, like working in Photoshop, but there’s something to be said about having things dock nicely in the screen. The lines are all perfect.
So far (day 2 of my evaluation), things are seeming pretty cool. I’ll just have to see if beats down Eclipse enough to shell out 60 euros… which is like 100 bucks-ish.
Update
I never bothered buying a key for PHP Designer. I found the auto-complete to be somewhat stupid at times.
Though, I never tried the compiler, which would let me test my PHP and Javascript before opening my browser.
