I’ve tried and tested many an IDE in my time, starting with Macromedia Dreamweaver 3 many years ago. Dreamweaver served my needs brilliantly for quite a few years and I was in belief that I wouldn’t ever need another IDE, but as I started coding in PHP and moved to clean handcoded XHTML and CSS from table based layouts, I found Dreamweavers clumsiness just started to get in the way. I also found it slow over the network as all of my files were stored on our Linux testing server.

So the hunt for an alternative started. After a while digging around for a new IDE, I came across a neat little program called Aptana. Whilst it was still in heavy development, I was amazed how quick it was and how rich the PHP functionality was compared to Dreamweaver. I tried it out for a while and eventually ditched Dreamweaver and started using Aptana for all my web design and PHP coding.

I happily used Aptana for quite a while, but when they decided to ditch PHP support for version 2.0 in favour of Eclipse PDT and concentrate more on Ruby development, I was forced to start my search again. The PDT functionality was not a patch on Aptanas PHP support, so I was (as were many Aptana users) rather disappointed with Aptanas decision to do this.

Anyway, so began the search for a new IDE which supported PHP. I tried all sorts from NuSphere to Zend but eventually came across Netbeans. Although PHP support was in its infancy, I was impressed with the functionality in Netbeans and it had far fewer bugs than Aptana 1.5. So I installed, started using it and I’m happy to say that our entire team are now using Netbeans for our PHP and web development. Its PHP functionality is improving all the time, has good support for CSS, JavaScript and HTML. There is the ability to upload your projects via FTP and SFTP and best of all, it’s FREE!

So if you’re looking at changing your IDE, I would recommend giving Netbeans a try.