PHPStorm 7 has been released!

DEV METAL does not get any money for saying this and there is no affiliate link or similar. This post is simply my private opinion, after mainly working with PHP and JavaScript for years.

Today PHPStorm 7 has been released! And there’s no doubt, this is by far the best IDE when you mainly work with PHP.

Every developer should work with an IDE. A fully Integrated Development Environment. It’s so much more than just a text editor. It’s so much more than just syntax highlighting. It handles your full development process and gives you excellent tools and helpers. You’ll never run into syntax errors again, you’ll never ask yourself what a variable contains at a special point in time. Personally, i hate the command line. Typing every little shit, trying to get things to run, messing around with mistypen commits, being in the wrong folder, you know what I mean. The nerd stuff. PHPStorm gets over this by giving you a graphical interface for all of that. This IDE simply makes things easy and useable.

PHPStorm is hardcore professional and extremely up-to-date. Let’s look on the main features:

• can work like a simple text editor if you like
• extremely powerful, but also extremely lightweight and fast
• syntax highlighting
• syntax checking & correction
• syntax completion
• recognition of code logic (notices you when using a two-parameter method with for example 3 parameters)
• config-free local debugging (look and manipulate every variable/object at any time in your running application)
• easy remote debugging
• integrated unit testing
• integrated database handling
• extremely easy versioning tools (git/github), so much better than working on the command line
• optional real-time editing, no saving anymore (saves after every character you type. weird at first, but very handy!)
• extremely easy integration of frameworks
• auto-creation of common code constructs (getters, setters, classes, interfaces, …)
• available for Windows 7/8, Mac OS X and Linux (I love the company for that)

New in PHPStorm 7

These are not just tiny new features: Especially the Vagrant integration is a serious killer thing.

• extremely easy integration of Vagrant: set up / start / stop a virtual machine containing your server within seconds
• one-click SSH-access to your Vagrant machines (integrated SSH command line)
• full support for PHP 5.5
• full support for Google App Engine
• one-click Composer integration and handling
• built-in REST client
• npm support / packet manager for easy node.js development
• Live-editing (browser shows real-time edits of your HTML/JavaScript code)
• Full screen mode
• …

PHPStorm is free for open-source projects (!) or 89€/$ for a personal licence, 179€/$ for a commercial one. Many people will now say: “Ah, I want to use free open-source stuff only”. But this is totally wrong. There’s a lot of work and skill behind all good things. Excellent tools are created by people who spend years working on that, spend years learning their skills, spend years of their lifes to create something good. The free-software mentality has established in the IT world, but it’s not representing reality (linux is created by multi-billion-dollar companies and highly paid devs, not by idealistic coders in their free-time by the way). Good things have good people behind, and a lot of professional work. Therefore, it’s totally okay to pay for good things. PHPStorm saves so much time and makes work so much better that these prices are really tiny compared to the things this IDE makes possible.

Try it out for free for 30 days or ask for free licences when doing open-source projects:

http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/

A free alternative: NetBeans

If you don’t want to spend money for your IDE, I can highly recommend NetBeans for PHP development! It’s free, open-source, community-driven and is the #2 behind PHPStorm (but still by far not as good as PHPStorm in every aspect).

https://netbeans.org/