Phpstorm: Smart & Fast Php Ide

By Author: Alexander Morozov
Total Articles: 1
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JetBrains PhpStorm is a lightweight, fast and very intelligent PHP IDE. It has endured despite intense competition from free tools such as Eclipse PDT and NetBeans. For that there are two main reasons:

It provides tools that have long been anticipated by the PHP community, such as automated refactoring, deep code analysis, on-the-fly error checking, quick-fixes. Listening to feedback from many developers, PhpStorm focuses on support for the latest PHP trends like PHP 5.3 namespaces, Phing and Symfony.
It brings common IDE features to an impressive level of intelligence. Its auto-completion, the most advanced and very fast compared to Eclipse or NetBeans, understands PHP, HTML, JavaScript (including a lot of external libraries) and CSS. The IDE is smart enough to figure out whether a given string is an SQL query or not, and highlights it accordingly. It also integrates with your Database to auto-complete table and field names right in your PHP code.

In addition, PHPStorm comes with the easiest debugging solution for most cases: the 'listen for debug ...
... connection' button. Just click it and start a debug session in your browser. Two clicks and debugging works, no matter which project or path on the web server. No configuration to be done in any project.
Full PHP support is backed by a powerful HTML, JavaScript and CSS editor. Live templates let you expand abbreviations to code fragments. There is support for generating documentation with JSDoc, ASDoc and PHPDoc. Testing with PHPUnit is integrated.
PHPStorm really is a real 'storm' when it comes to performance. The UI is very fast, and the filesystem refreshes automatically after a few seconds. The IDE is highly configurable and also supports plugins.
Nicely enough, the developers of PhpStorm release updates every few months and keep up to date with the latest web development standards. The latest PhpStorm release supports HTML5, JavaScript5, LESS and SASS extensions for CSS.
Add Phing support, .htaccess support, Git/Mercurial/SVN/CVS integration, Database integration and about a million other useful little things like Zen-coding support, Symfony and Zend Framework support, CSS color preview in the gutter - and you've got simply the best PHP IDE out there at the moment.