Comments on: The Five Tools I Can’t Develop Without

By: Mike Willbanks

Mike Willbanks — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 01:34:19 +0000

Brandon… all right post. I feel I must mention mine.
Continuous integration since without it developers write sloppy code and do not test what their change may have broken.
Code reviews as someone needs to be the enforcer before code goes running through the environments
Technical documentation as the next person would waste countless hours without it.
Their own VPS of the software, as slow machines are no fun and your dev environment should be as close to production as possible.
Vim as once you really learn it, it is your best friend.

By: eliezer faizal

eliezer faizal — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 06:30:44 +0000

My favorite tools:
Netbeans, gEdit (Notepad), Terminal

I prefer system.out.println rather than debugger

By: Stephen Cox

Stephen Cox — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 05:56:31 +0000

I wanna second PHPStorm. You should check it out. The Local History feature sold me on it.

By: E.J. Sexton

E.J. Sexton — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 02:14:52 +0000

Great post. I have found everything you have said to be true.

Also, thanks for the tip on FirePHP. I had heard about the add-on before, but I had never tried it out. It looks like it could be very useful. Everyone raves about the Web Developer add-on as well, but I do not find it that useful. Nevertheless, I keep it installed, as it does come in handy occasionally. I love FireBug.

I also agree with those who commented that version control is also a must. Using version control, such as SVN, has saved me a lot of time and pain, and has improved my productivity.

I currently use OSTicket for issue tracking, but I much prefer Bugzilla.

By: evanx

evanx — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 12:04:03 +0000

Netbeans, svn, trac, firebug, google

By: Matthew

Matthew — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 15:52:37 +0000

Hi Brandon,

great post. I think I’ve tried the gamut from vi/vim, Quanta, Eclipse, TextMate and now Netbeans. Whilst it can be nice for companies to standardise, I believe that it’s best for the developer to pick an IDE that they work best with and know it thoroughly, so that they’re very efficient with it – sort of like a word worker or chef would choose the tools that they work best with and build great proficiency with them. I don’t really agree with enforcing a specific IDE on users.

The firefox developer tools, along with YSlow, Hammerhead, validator and reference plugins are just essential, but the Chrome tools are really improving as well. Also having a solid development workflow I find to be extremely effective for efficient development. Applications, such as a continuous integration server, like phpUnderControl, integrating with a standard version control tool and deployment process serve to ease unnecessary problems.

cheers,

Matt

By: mnt

mnt — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 09:55:29 +0000

I still don’t know why programmers refuse to use debuggers instead of print_r/var_dump’ing.

By: Petah

Petah — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 09:05:36 +0000

A unix based console. A light text editor (Notepad++). GUI diff tool (Netbeans, or SmartGit). Database sync tool (Toad for MySQL).

All free.

By: Dave Fisher

Dave Fisher — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:21:55 +0000

Great post! My current employer fitted me out with an iMac when I first joined and even though the display was clear I couldn’t handle using one screen for everything.
Not a huge amount of memory for running vm’s either. So took the odd step of taking my mac pro with dual screens in to the office. Hell of lot more productive with a decent setup.

By: Meketrefe

Meketrefe — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 23:11:36 +0000

On Windows I just need my own LAMP stack, UltraEdit, Web Developer Toolbar + Firebug, xdebug and a text “todo” file. The rest is extra and doesn’t anything super duper to the mentioned core of tools…

And yes, I’m pretty doing fine with that…

By: eRadical

eRadical — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 21:14:12 +0000

I’m still not trying to force/standardise Zend Studio but if NetBeans does not fix the “insert TABs as SPACES” issue I think I will be forced to do so…

Half of the team is working with NetBeans and half with Zend Studio. Most of the “TABs as SPACES” come from NetBeans even when the option is not set…
It’s a killer to work with fuzzy-indended code…

They really must pay attention to that!

By: Seb Barre

Seb Barre — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 21:02:06 +0000

One comment about companies standardizing on an IDE. We did this at a previous company, and while efficiency and speed are good reasons to let coders pick their own tools, the argument can be made for consistency of environment also being a contributing factor to efficiency.

In the end we relaxed the rules to allow some choice, as long as the developer’s IDE choice supported XDebug and SVN..

By: Nils Luxton

Nils Luxton — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 15:31:38 +0000

Good points. Dual monitor has been a must for me for years now, I really can’t imagine not having that second screen!

On the topic of IDEs, I’ve tried Netbeans but didn’t really get on with it. It’s autocomplete wasn’t as good/fast as NuSphere PhpEd (which I used previously).

However, I recently discovered phpStorm from JetBrains. Now I don’t work for them or anything, but I had such a “wow” moment the first week or so I used it, I feel almost duty-bound to extoll its virtues to other devs(!)

It blows all the other IDEs I’ve used out of the water (PhpEd, Eclipse PDT, Zend Studio, Netbeans, Komodo, phpDesigner, the list goes on and on…) – it’s fast, great autocomplete (including arrays and arrays of objects), good refactoring support, great HTML/JS support, and lots and lots of really little things that just make life much easier. And perhaps best of all, their development cycle is rapid, and their Early Access Preview (read: beta) is publicly available.

Anyway, nice article, I’m looking forward to reading others’ comments.

By: Forever student

Forever student — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 10:55:45 +0000

Funny how you write about having an IDE of your choice, then you mention NetBeans as an example, and half of the comments is from people suggesting other IDEs.
Guys you miss the point. Use whatever you like, not whatever somebody else tells you to use.

By: jozef

jozef — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 08:17:29 +0000

- Netbeans PHP 6.9 with XDebug + my own PHP logger (static class) + my own PHP exception handler
- Subversion server, TortoiseSVN client
- Mantis bugtracker
- FF with Firebug, Web developer plugins
- Notepad++ with Function list plugin