NetBeans 6.5 PHP edition

Today i test run the NetBeans 6.5 Beta for PHP. Download is only 20MB. First of all let me explain what I expect from and IDE. I spent some time working with .Net framework and C#. And let me tell you something, Microsoft Visual Studio is definitely number one IDE out there.

However, I can’t use Visual Studio since I’m actively programming in PHP. I’m a big fan of Notepad++. I have a feeling it’s a best editor a programmer can get for free on Windows platform. Actually I have a feeling it’s even better then most of the commercial ones as well. However, using editors to manage large projects gets to be quite impractical with time.

I’m a big fan of Visual Studio’s code completion feature. Therefore I expect a good IDE to have a good code completion implemented. What exactly do I mean when i say good code completion? Let’s look at PHP. Language it self has no namespace, therefore one must relay on include and require statements. I’ve tested quite a few commercial and open source IDE solutions for PHP, and must say, most of them left me positively surprised. This excludes Zend and NuSphere, the commercial IDEs for PHP.

By the time of this writing, the latest version of NetBeans is 6.5 and that’s in Beta stage. I though I’ll give it a try since it’s free. Download package is only 20MB in size thatis if you choose PHP edition only.

Most of my work evolves around WordPress and Magento these days. Have you ever worked with Magento? It’s huge, it has over 6000 files in basic installation package. Try managing that using merely your editor. There are few features I expect my IDE to have. Code completion is one of them, and in NetBEans it looks awesome. There are still few thing to work on, but it’s working as it should, and that’s what counts.

What exactly do I mean? If you import, let’s say wordpress, project into NetBeans, open any file and start typing, let’s say, “bl” and hit CTRL + SPACE you’ll see code completion popping out giving you all the available methods (functions) you have in WP starting with letters “bl”. If you choose one, let’s say “bloginfo()” and hit enter, it will automatically add “require “wp-includes/general-template.php”;”.

This is where I fall for it, and I’m officially in love with NetBeans for now. I’ve been using NuSphere PhpEd for some time, he also has similar feature but he does not write the require statement like NetBeans. It’s the small things that make people happy. Another thing, and the most important one, NetBeans is free.

There are few other things NetBeans stand out of the crowd, like XHTML code completion and so on. This post is not intended to be some detailed review of a product. It’s a merely an personal observation. I’m just saying I feel more comfortable now, today, using NetBeans than using Zend or NuSpere; not to mention the cost of each of them. If you have some spare time, give it a try.