PHP development can be a complicated task without the right tools. With a little insight into what tools to use, some practical knowledge of how to use those tools, and an investment of relatively little time and effort, you can find yourself developing PHP applications in no time at all.

There are a few pieces you're going to want to look for. The main piece you're going to want is an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment. An IDE brings together a number of essential and complementary capabilities.

The first capability you'll want is syntax highlighting. This makes the process of programming in any language vastly more simple. Being able to see language keywords at a glance, thanks to different text colors (and sometimes other effects like bold or italic text, background colors, etc.) makes it much easier to understand the flow of a program without reading word by word. This is really a must-have feature.

The second capability you're going to look for is code-completion. Code completion allows you to start typing a word and be prompted with possible keyword matches based on the language you're programming in and the code you've already written.

The third capability you're going to want in order to be really efficient with your coding is source control integration. Common source control systems include Subversion (SVN), Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) and Perforce. Others such as Git are also gaining traction.

The main benefit of using a source control system is having the ability to see what changes you've made to a file over time, as well as the ability to revert to previous versions at any time.

And the fourth and final feature you're going to look for is debugger integration. Debugging is notoriously messy with PHP. It usually amounts to not much more than printing out text at points in your code. This doesn't count in my view. The debugger needs to allow you to pause code execution via breakpoints and inspect the values of variables and attributes.

This one feature, a well-integrated debugger, is, in my view the single most valuable feature that I get from an IDE.

Given this shopping list of features, the choices for a PHP development become rather limited.

My personal favorite is an IDE called Komodo, made by a company called ActiveState. Komodo runs on every major operating system, contains all of the main features I'm looking for, and looks darn nice to boot.

Some other IDEs, such as Aptana and the PDT project from the Eclipse foundation are fairly good alternatives to Komodo. But none of them has the ease of use and full functionality that Komodo offers.

So, if you're looking for a tool that actually makes you a better PHP developer, head over to www.activestate.com and download a trial version of Komodo IDE to see what it can do for you.

Learn more about this author, Laran Evans.
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