Top PHP Development Tools Every Developer Should Explore

Unlike other frameworks that do not have proper community support and documentation, PHP excels in all these while ideally providing well-strategized frameworks and scripts that are ready to implement. Apart from these appealing benefits, for an amateur or a developer with little to no technical knowledge, hypertext preprocessor is the best place to start.

What makes PHP different from other languages is that it helps simplify and make the web application development process relatively easy. Yes, it’s being implemented for some of the most significant projects and has been in use for years, but it’s chiefly interesting because it is enhanced on a daily basis. If you’ve come across PHP 7, then you already know programmers are currently working on improving the performance of web apps.

Another exciting aspect is that all this is being achieved without increasing memory consumption. Ideally, this will allow developers to hasten the development of web apps and custom websites with ease by taking advantage of full-stack and lightweight PHP frameworks.

Enough about how excellent PHP is, let us look at some of the PHP development tools that any developer shouldn’t lack.

PHPStorm

This is one of the top-rated PHP tools out there for developers, and it comes with the latest features that allow you to do your projects swiftly. PHPStorm is designed and promoted by JetBrains, one of the most reputed firms in PHP coding tools for developers.

PHPStorm works perfectly with essential PHP frameworks like Zend Studio, CakePHP, Symfony, Laravel, Yii. Also, it supports primary content management systems like Magento, WordPress, and Drupal.

Any web development project can’t be complete without front end technologies, and that’s where PHPStorm comes into the picture. It paves the way for real-time editing of things like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Sass, TypeScript, and many others. It ideally allows for code refactoring, unit testing as well as debugging.

Eclipse

This is another popular PHP development tool, and that’s why it is one of the top in this list. Since it’s a fully developed PHP tool, it’s one of the most used integrated development environment that PHP provides. The most appealing thing about Eclipse is that it provides support to some of the most prominent operating systems like macOS, Linux, and Windows. Some of the tools that Eclipse offers make it easier to develop as well as simplify complex PHP applications. With this PHP development tool, you have the freedom to pick from a vast array of plugins. It ideally supports both GUI and non-GUI applications. This is one of those tools that allows you to utilize those plugins that help in customizing and extending the IDE to match the requirements of the project.

NetBeans

This is another popular free PHP development tool that has rich features and enables multiple languages, including English, Russian and Portuguese. NetBeans free version goes back to 2010 when Sun Microsystems initially created it. Oracle later took over it. Since it was launched, it has had a huge community of developers who are always working on an open-source environment.

Long gone are days when NetBeans had a reputation for being slow and just known for development in Java. Today, the tool is lightweight, fast, and supports the whole thing in PHP. It has the best support resources for all sorts for PHP frameworks such as Smarty Doctrine, Zend, Symfony2 and ideally, supports Laravel via Laravel-IDE-helper. Not just that, but NetBeans can enable support for frameworks such as WordPress, FuelPHP, CakePHP, and Yii.

Some of the attributes that keep NetBeans on top of this list are the code templates, quick fixes, smart code completion, and much more.

Zend Studio

This PHP development tool also makes it in this list due to its unparalleled speed compared to other tools. When utilizing Zend Studio, developers and programmers can enjoy the flexibility of writing as well as debugging code without having to put extra effort or time to accomplish the same. With this development tool, you can easily organize your application on multiple servers. It has ideally been designed to support PHP 7. Not only that, but it’s capable of code debugging in integration with X-debug, Zend Debuggers, and X-ray. Ideally, there’s a possibility of integration via Eclipse plugins.

Sublime Text 3

This one gets a position in this list as it’s one of the sturdiest PHP text editors out there. It is lightweight with essential attributes and is supported on Windows, Linux, and OSX. Sublime Text 3 got its powers from various packages and plugins.

There are numerous PHP packages in the market that help in transforming this editor into an ideal PHP IDE. PHPDoc, PHPCS, and Sublime PHP companion are some of the most helpful packages to solve the purpose.

Once you combine Sublime Text 3 as a Hypertext Preprocessor IDE with additional packages, you will find classy sublime text and the strength of PHP all in one place.

Atom

This is the latest text editor from GitHub, and you can get it for free under an MIT license. Atom, along with its big community, has a lot of packages and plugins that expand its functionality.

This is a fully flexible development tool meaning that you can transform it into an online Hypertext Preprocessor editor because it is pretty scalable and very customizable. Not only that but it’s an ideal cross-platform option that supports Windows, OS X, Red Hat Linux as well as Fedora 22+.

Komodo

Developed in 2000 by ActiveState, this IDE is one of the best hypertext preprocessor MySQL development tools. Most of Komodo’s functionalities are borrowed from the Python interpreter.

Komodo utilizes Scintilla and Mozilla as the foundation as they share much of the features, functionality, and support. Pipe feature and the many extensions have made Komodo pretty popular.

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