djsipe.com | Web Development

Over the years I’ve used a number of different PHP IDEs.  Some were great some were “meh”.  One of the things I look for in an IDE is if it really does make my life easier.  When I have things to do, I can’t afford to spend days getting my IDE to work as advertised it just needs to work.

Zend Studio

I’ve used Zend Studio from versions 5 to 8 and with the exception of 5, they all…well…kinda sucked.  Ever since Zend decided to adopt Eclipse, it’s been slow a nightmare.  There’s the potential to be great, but as with all things Eclipse, you have to spend a lot of time upfront configuring the IDE to do whatever it is you want it to do—and it’s ridiculously slow.  I can remember spending no less than an hour fumbling around with plugin dependencies before ultimately giving up and swearing off Zend Studio (until the next version came out with all the promise of a new dawn).  Cost: $299

Komodo

Admittedly, I haven’t used Komodo for years but I remember it was also a solid IDE.  I do remember the interface being a little clunky and hard to navigate around, but the folks at ActiveState may have addressed that in later versions.  Cost: $382

Eclipse PDT

Eclipse PDT is the core IDE for PHP from the open source Eclipse project.  It’s pretty much the same as Zend Studio these days except that it’s free and doesn’t tie in with Zend’s proprietary products.  Being free, it’s hard to speak too ill of it, so in some ways I like it better than Zend Studio.  But when it comes down to it it’s even less pre-configured for out of the box development than Zend Studio.  This means it took even longer to get it into a condition where I could use it.  I ultimately uninstalled it and never looked back.  But if you have the patience and expertise to stick with it, PDT can do great things for you.  Cost: Free!

Aptana

Aptana is a really good IDE.  It has great PHP and JavaScript support.  Also based on Eclipse, but somehow not as slow as PDT or Zend Studio.  Aptana also has great out-of-the-box usability to it.  It’s a great choice if you want a free IDE that handles both PHP and JavaScript reasonably well.  One down side it that it comes with a lot of obnoxious “ads” (links to) for their integrated hosting services.  Cost: Free! 

PHP Storm

In my opinion, PHP Storm is the absolute best PHP IDE.  It is extremely well thought out and makes programming a pleasure with its code assist auto-completions.  I don’t know how they did it, but it seems like it always knows what I am about to type.  As with most other IDEs it has support for Git, SVN, and everything else you’d need.  There’s also Phing, Xdebug, PHPUnit, and more.  I do remember it didn’t come with out-of-the-box support for MySQL and I had to fumble around with an ODBC driver and buggy Java modules to get MySQL working in it.  Cost: $99

PHPDesigner

PHPDesigner is good workhorse IDE.  It doesn’t have a lot of the slickness of some others, but it is fast and it just works.   It also supports true remote projects where your code is saved on a remote server.  Being able to work on remote files directly without having to download them is a godsend in situations where your codebase can’t be easily configured to run on your local computer.  But, understandably, when working on remote files the support for code assist options is limited to only those files you have opened.  PHPDesigner also has some annoying quirks with the way it handles the auto-pairing of opening quotes, parentheses, and HTML tags—but again the support for remote projects outweighs all of these minor problems.  Cost: $37

If I’ve missed any others, and I’m sure I have, just let me know which ones and what you think about them.

Update: With the release of Zend_Layout, the need to this sort of workaround has diminished.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the Zend Framework. After fumbling around with a primitive MVC application at work, I was instantly won over by the clean, and intuitive way they implement MVC. Round about version 0.9, the ViewRenderer was introduced. ViewRenderer is, I’d say, 90% useful. It makes certain assumptions about the way you’re using the framework. If you color between the lines it’s a great help.

One thing I almost always have to do is override the way it selects and automatically renders templates based on controller and action names. I typically roll with a single template and load elements into that template. Of course, I could just disable ViewRenderer altogether, but it does do a lot of other things that I find helpful, like initializing the View.

My solution: extend the default Zend_Controller_Action class. There’s only a few things to do:

1. Disable the auto-render functionality of ViewRenderer
2. Add a new $_template property to hold the template to render
3. Render a single template in the postDispatch method

Here’s the code:

require_once "Zend/Controller/Action.php";

class Blink_Controller_Action extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
    protected $_template = "defaultTemplate.phtml";

    public function init()
    {
        $this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender(true);
        parent::init();
    }

    public function postDispatch()
    {
        echo $this->view->render($this->_template);
    }
}

With our new controller action, we can then largely forget about rendering the View. All we have to do is assign values to the View:

require_once "Blink/Controller/Action.php";

class MyController extends Blink_Controller_Action
{
    public function IndexAction ()
    {
        $this->view->myValue = "some value";
        // Assign more values...
        // Do business logic...

        // Optionally, select a new template to render
        $this->_template = "differentTemplate.phtml";
    }
}