It has become difficult for me to find time and blog something. Time is still precious and I have not learned how to manage it. Oh well...

Anyways, I wanted to quickly rant a bit on my excitment on one of the tools I use almost everyday for my PHP side projects. Two or three weeks ago one of my favorite IDEs reached an important update which incorporated (final) support for PHP language. Although I had seen Netbeans with Early PHP Access earlier this year, this new release has become a great milestone for the Netbeans followers like me.

Netbeans is free and offers support for several programming languages. Its PHP support comes in the flavors of intellisence, syntax highlighting, support for OOP, support for MySQL editing and “querying”, PHPdoc capability providing the developer documenting tools, a debugger, instant rename, code templates, automatic code completion and many other features that make this IDE a great free editor. You can even “adapt” support for JavaScript and PHP frameworks; I personally enjoy the benefits of the JavaScript editor with JQuery, which comes with browser compatibility check. It also integrates very well with CSS and HTML editors making web development a breeze. Uff…

Netbeans keeps getting better. I feel its interface running faster…and of course, you get all the benefits of this complete framework, allowing you to create or install plug-ins, thus extending its functionality. There are many plugins already written, both from the Netbeans team and the community. You can also take advantage of the support for other technologies in your web development projects, like XML and UML. And with this IDE –I really love this!- you can develop in any platform. So when I am in my Ubuntu box, I still have the same IDE!

Yes, I know, I just like it. There are many options up there, both free and commercial to do web development with PHP and MySQL; but netbeans has become a terrific alternative for those of you that just want to jump right into the coding!

Check it out over here!