A good, well designed, development tool can provide a huge productivity boost over an editor if it's used properly. And I don't mean auto-generated code by this either.
Right off the bat, any good development tool will have code completion abilities, which are basically the programmers version of nix consoles tab completion. This little feature alone helps save time by reducing the amount of typing required, not to mention can virtually eliminate type-o's in function or variable names. Another basic feature any good IDE will have is a built in library of all php functions so that you can view the function along with all its arguments while your typing. Need to use a rare function and can't remember the order of the arguments it requires? Having this feature eliminates the need for you to go look up the function to check this trivial item. Additionally a good IDE will automatically read in the definitions for functions and classes you have defined in the current project and automatically add them to the above mentioned items. These first two things are immediately obvious to even first time users and will speed things up, but the real benefits come from other items such as a integrated debugging tools, performance analyzers, a good class browser, and built in database connectivity. If you're working in a team environment having an IDE which has built-in support for a content verification system can also be a huge advantage. Again, these features will only benefit someone who knows how to use them. Unfortunately I have yet to find a truly good PHP IDE. The two best I've found to date are NuSphere's PHPEd 3.0.0 (which unfortunately has dozens of minor, but annoying bugs) and the Zend IDE (which is very nice, but it crawls on anything but the fastest systems). If either of these fix the for-mentioned issues I'd be the first in line to purchase them. At 06:07 PM 7/10/2002 +0200, Uwe Birkenhain wrote: >I think that - on windows - nothing is better than textpad >(www.textpad.com). >Simply the best editor the world has seen so far! > >What makes development tools better than a good editor? (serious question) > >Uwe > > > >-- >PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) >To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
