NetBeans 6.5 for PHP – My Experience

Konstantin Mirin — Fri, 22 May 2009 07:00:48 +0000

Introduction

Personal productivity depends on the tools greatly, so I pay much attention to the programs I use. My previous post in this field was about MySQL workbench which I consider the best free DB design tool for MySQL.

When I started coding PHP, I used Linux so I used Kate, which only had syntax highlighting and allowed to save multiple files opened as a project Next was Quanta, the Linux IDE for PHP. I spent lots of time developing there until I installed trial version of Zend Development Environment (ZDE) 5.5. That was really cool. I liked it very much and used for quite long time. Around half a year ago I heard about NetBeans and decided to try it out. I was thinking quite long about it, I didn’t have enough time to install and go through all it’s functions. Finally I saw that I will never have this time, so I started using it around 1.5 months ago. While using, I was putting down some notes about the things I liked and the ones I didn’t. So now I just want to present my list

Advantages

What I really liked about NetBeans is that it is “the only IDE you need”. It has excellent Java support, good HTML, JS and PHP support and it even has C++ support, but I didn’t try it out, I use the old good Visual Studio 6
So here are the things I liked:

HTML support is excellent. It founds tag mismatch, highlights start and end tags (this is extremely helpful when you deal with large portions of bad-formatted code
When you’re in HTML scope, and typing “
Code formatting is great in everywhere. When working in Zend Studio, I was using 3rd party tools to format HTML, NetBeans does it perfectly. As for other languages, the only problem I have with it is that NetBeans puts opening curly bracket on the same line as loop or function definition, I like putting it on the next line so I see opening and closing brackets one under another. However, it highlights the opposite bracket, so it’s not a big problem
Greatest thing I got there is normal debugging in PHP, not just “echo”, “print_r()” and “exit”. NetBeans integrates with XDebug and it is VERY convenient. It provides normal info as any other debugger – stack trace, local variables, superglobals, watches etc. It saves great amount of time. The only drawback is that NetBeans starts debugging session slowly, but it is definitely faster, than “echo” and “exit”
When switching from Zend Studio, I experienced some inconveniences because NetBeans uses other shortcuts. However, it provides more useful shortcuts than ZDE, and I got used to it quickly
When you code in languages like JS or PHP, where using variables without declaration is not compilation error, it is a common mistake to misspell variable and then get some interesting bugs. That’s where variable highlighting helps greatly. In NetBeans you can put cursor into any variable and in a second you’ll see all occurrences of this variable in the file. That is also very helpful when you are digging through someone’s code
Search is also much better, than in Zend. When you search in files, search results are grouped by file. When you search in the file, you get all occurrences highlighted. This is also very useful when you’re looking into someone’s code or performing some refactoring
Commenting support is also great. For example, you write some //comment. If the line is long, you want to break it into several lines and press enter when you’re inside the line. NetBeans inserts line break and next line continues as comment! This is so helpful when you’re commenting some file and your comments are quite long.
PHPDoc support is also great. The fact, that you get help for function, its arguments and return value if you specify function description in the PHPDoc format wasn’t new to me, but if you start writing PHPDoc comment for the ready function and put “/**“, you immediately get full PHPDoc template – all arguments list with placeholders, @return keyword, so everything remained is only put actual description, everything is automated. That’s great! The only thing I’d like to add here is that when function definition is changed, it should update PHPDoc comment – remove correspondent line or add more variables I guess, that’s a dream
Very useful feature is auto-reloading files. You don’t need to reopen log every time it is updated. However, there is a slight disadvantage – if file is deleted in the file system, it doesn’t propose to save a copy like Zend does.
It has built-in diff tool. It is MEGA-useful I have to compare files quite frequently, I was using WinMerge before that, but it was inconvenient. NetBeans integrates everything in one environment and it is very nice!
Auto-complete is better, than in ZDE, it takes scope into consideration. However, it is sometimes buggy.
In NetBeans you can view your DB in the same IDE, perform queries, view tables structure and much more. This tool is not as good as phpMyAdmin, so I am using the latter most of the time. Main reason is that NetBeans is slow when switching from code mode to the DB mode. But maybe that’s my PC

Disadvantages

And now some things I didn’t like:

Code templates are worse, than in Zend Studio. This thing is really simple there and behaved as supposed. In NetBeans I add some template, e.g. “echo ‘
```
’.print_r($var,true).’
```
’;” for the “pri” keyword. And sometimes it doesn’t appear, sometimes it is inserted with additional
There is no PHP or JS help integrated into IDE. In Zend Studio I could select php function and click “F1″ and get full help. In Aptana IDE there is the same for JS, but there is noting like this here! Why? Is it something complex?
No FTP support without additional plug-ins. I didn’t have time to explore this feature, but I don’t like the fact I have to install something more for such common feature
There is UML package for Java, why there is nothing like this for JS?

Conclusion

Anyway, despite of the disadvantages, I think, that NetBeans is better, because it offers even more features, than Zend, but for free! And it’s really good with Java I especially liked refactoring there. Just put the name of the class and everything is changed correspondently!

What are your thoughts about NetBeans? Are you using/planning to use it? What are your workarounds for the disadvantages I noted? Can you add more “pros”?

Liked the post? Bookmark it

Hide Sites

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Yii – the framework of my choice

Konstantin Mirin — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 06:08:46 +0000

Long journey to the framework…

I’m developing web-applications since 2004, I am crazy about nice architecture and first-class CSS+JS frontend. On the server side, I was using my framework, quite basic one. And all my projects were based on it.

In the October 2008 I finished one of my projects using my own framework. Then looked at it critically, then saw description of the Zend Framework (it had so many features, that mine didn’t!), and decided to move from my own development to the better product.

Main requirements to the framework were:

100% OO architecture. I don’t like to work with Drupal or jQuery. I enjoy ExtJS, for example. And I wanted the same nicely designed PHP framework. Nice OOP in PHP began from the PHP5, so all frameworks, that were initially written in PHP4 and not completely rebuilt to PHP 5 are not considered.
Component/modular architecture
Event-driven programming. I enjoyed this thing in ExtJS and wanted to write PHP code in the similar way
Excellent documentation. Again, I compare this to the ExtJS docs, which are VERY nice. So I wanted every little feature explained and documented.
Active community. It’s never possible to cover everything in the documentation, so active community is a VERY big plus.

Sure, framework must be free.
Initially, I was choosing between ZendFramework, CodeIgniter, Symfony, CakePHP. However, fully PHP5 are only ZF and Symfony. Yes, I know, that both Cake and CI have PHP5 classes, but they are not designed for PHP5. CI, in particular, states:

Note: CodeIgniter will run on PHP 5. It simply does not take advantage of any native features that are only available in that version.

But neither ZF nor Symfony had event-driven programming, so I found one more framework – PRADO. I liked all it’s features, expecially component approach and event-driven programming, but on the prado forums I found an announcement, that Main team members has developed a completely new framework, that took best things from PRADO, but has significantly better performance. Yes, it’s Yii, the framework of my choice.

OK, I’m here, but what’s that?

From the official site:

The name Yii (pronounced as [i:]) stands for easy, efficient and extensible.

I studied the definitive guide. (By the way, it is now available in 9 languages. Translation is done by the community. German and Russian translations are almost finished, others coming soon)
I immediately liked it’s:

100% OO architecture. It is really good application design.
Authentication & roles mechanism
Caching techniques
DB access, which is based on PDO
Active record and relational active record implementation
Validation – that is really, really nice. To create quite complex register form (check if login is unique, if email is unique, email match with confirmation, passwords match, validate integer/string values, check empty fields and give nice error messages for each field you need only template (view) and model with rules defined. It took me 10-15 mins to do that!)
Component concept. Just to give an idea, why is it nice – you can define getter and setter methods for properties, you can define read-only properties for components, define and invoke events, attach event handlers and additional features to the class without modifying it, just by attaching additional behaviour to it

And, yes, Yii is quite fast. And in combination with it’s advanced caching it can be used for the high-loaded websites, I’m developing one with it now

By the way, Yii is the only PHP framework selected for the Great Indian Development Award voting. I voted for it, maybe you’ll like it also? Try it and vote for it!

P.S. If you’re Russian, join us in the Russian discssion board, I reply all threads there and clarify all questions.

Programmer's Notes » choice