Posted by chaloum on January 23, 2012 at 12:18am
In the recent past we moved over to Macs I've been using Textmate or Drupal and PHP dev, but recently ran into a Drupal developer using NetBeans and as I use Visual Studio for .Net dev, I thought Netbeans was very good, but as I look around there are other IDEs out there with Drupal support that appear to offer the same level of functionality but executed in different ways.
So without getting in to a war I am interesting in hearing your experiences with, and your view on various IDEs.
Thanks
Marcel
Comments
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I've recently been using Sublime Text 2, which is an extremely fast editor but not specifically a great IDE. With tweaks you can make it do most of what other great IDEs do, but I still consider from time to time if it's the right choice for me.
Before Sublime Text 2 I was using Komodo IDE, which is a great IDE for Drupal, it will scan the project file gathering all information on declared functions, providing autocompletion of Drupal functions including documentation (if provided) on what arguments the functions take and what the arguments should consist of. However it could get very sluggish after a while.
The biggest thing I miss from Komodo is the Regex editor, it was by far the best I'd ever used.
netbeans 7.1 not bad
Netbeans is really coming of age for PHP development.
It's free and cross platform (I'm running it on Ubuntu 10.10) and it works pretty well.
Does all your PHP highlighting (you have to install the PHP plugin) and just recently (7.1 I think) introduced git version control support, which is really handy.
It's a bit of a java monster so you need a grunty bit of hardware. Also, if you running it on Linux, make sure you are using Sun java, not the "open" java that comes out of the box most of the time. Just works better with Sun.
Also, be careful if you are viewing files that are mounted from a remove machine (even a vm on your machine) as Netbeans is always scanning all the files looking for updates (or doing something anyway). Works better if you are looking at files on the real local file system.
Have also used Netbeans on mac and it's not bad.
Worth a look.
Been using Intellij for a while
tried a heap, none of them really seemed to fit the way I work and seemed sluggish, then the java nerds put me onto IntelliJ. Been using it for about 12 months now. Its been great for the way we work, I like it selective change management with git. Debugging works. It is a java app, but fast on my hardware. We use it on osx and linux. Well worth the free trial for a month, even though its not free, once you get use to it its money well spent. This is the one app I would recommend spending money on once you have tried it.
+1 for netbeans
I use and like Netbeans. It's cross platform, which works for me as I have a Windows machine at work and a mac at home.
It's a snap to set up Xdebug break point debugging with Xampp / MAMP.
Plenty of RAM is the key to having it run OK I think.
Zend IDE here, i use my local
Zend IDE here, i use my local apache2 but with zend's apache2-PHP libraries as the current Ubuntu PHP includes suhosin which breaks the debugger and cant be totally removed :(
http://dgtlmoon.com
I use Eclipse with Aptana
I use Eclipse with Aptana plugin - works on Windows and Linux and does the job nicely.
For a while I used phpEd from NuSphere (commercial) - fantastic but windows only. Does work in Wine I suppose....but Eclipse is just sooooo easy to install.
http://geoff.com.au - http://redronin.com
Eclipse, Netbeans fine - Komodo, phpEd not so. IntelliJ best
For me Eclipse and Netbeans are on par. Both are free, feature easy to install Xdebug interfaces (especially when you run a MAMP stack).
On the Mac I've found "Eclipse for PHP developers" sometimes go in a spin where CPU goes through the roof, the fan starts blowing and execution grinds to a halt. Not sure if this is while the debugger runs or not.
So now, like AndrewBoag and tripper54, I mostly use Netbeans and have found no issues, except that I miss some of the handy short-cuts that Eclipse has, like moving a line up or down by holding down ALT+arrow. Both Eclipse and Netbeans have all the tricks Deciphered mentions w.r.t to Komodo, like autocomplete, function help on hover, "Go to declaration", etc. Due to the dynamic nature of PHP, Eclipse's refactoring options, which are pretty smart in the case of statically typed languages like Java, are a little underwhelming.
I've used Komodo and NuSphere phpEd but didn't think these added much at all compared to Eclipse and Netbeans. And their search facilities are sooo slow.
However from my Java days I remember IntelliJ was the best of them all. Thanks timbot for reminding me to check it out in a Drupal/PHP context.
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It would be interesting to see a data matrix put together comparing the different IDEs, containing features, memory usage, cross-compatibility, cost, etc. Although, It seems like there would have to be something like that already...
Like This?
like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_integrated_development_enviro...
--Ryan
Ryan Cross
Drupal Development Services
ProjectPier project management and collaboration software
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Like it, but not it. Specifically target at Drupal development, and including more information like Cost, Average memory consumption, etc.
One of the killer features of Komodo IDE for me was the ability to autocomplete Drupal functions, even those defined my contrib modules. Admittedly it was also the cause of the Memory consumption issues as it was continuously scanning the filesystem. Sublime Text 2 does have a similar ability, though I have yet to enable it, but it's not as straight forward, I believe it requires a module containing a Drush make call (written by Tanc) to be run to index the functions, which may suit but isn't entirely as easy to use.
like this?
I started one a while ago, very incomplete and probably not exactly what you want, but you can add to it if you want.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Arx7hKCbAf_ddDZ5cUpqbDdlTGl...
Not shown is NetBeans, which I use now and have done for 2 years. I still sometimes flick back to Eclipse if I need HTML formatted (for the life of me I can't figure out how to do this on NetBeans) or if I want to copy syntax-highlighted code to a document. But I can't use Eclipse on the Mac, it always hangs. NetBeans is stable.
Shaun
cross post
this should probably be moved over to http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-ide
There is also quite a bit of info already collected at http://drupal.org/node/147789
--Ryan
Ryan Cross
Drupal Development Services
ProjectPier project management and collaboration software
.net code for data matrix
.net code for data matrix scanner
http://www.keepautomation.com/products/net_barcode_reader/
Intellij
I have used netbeans extensively - particularly for the database interface. 'Run selection' is a huge time saver.
But intellij is still a huge improvement in productivity. The amount of stuff it picks up that would 'bite badly' has saved me many times. Php would happily let it through and you wouldn't see it - I can tell from a random selection of pre-written code - but it would bite you. And then you would have to spend 2 days trying to find the issue through re-iteration. It is foolhardy to code php without a code scanner running in the background continuously.
Installing php code sniffer: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/using-php-code-sniffer-tool.html
Other timesavers.
- Code Style > Php. From the Drupal standards. All the problems shown 'in yellow' in one pass. No need to run the style checker 100s of times. From experience this takes 'code tidy up' from a couple of days to a mere hour.
http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/drupal-specific-coding-assistance....
It could still be better. e.g. templates to do standard menu patterns and the like. And because menus are 'all text arrays' you can still stare at a spelling mistake and not see why the menu isn't working. Would be nice if test skeletons could be generated.
Thanks
John