NuSphere PhpED 4.0

				
As every decent IDE should, PhpED provides assistance at all the stages of application development process, including debugging your code, publishing your projects to remote servers through FTP, SFTP and WebDAV and integrating with repository-based code management systems such as CVS. Administrative tasks can be easily performed through terminals (SSH and Telnet are supported).
 
What are the key features of PhpED? you may be asking yourself. The most valuable features are below:
Code Insight (incl. Code Completion, Code Explorer, Tooltips and Instant Error Analysis)
Enhanced Code Editor 
Database Support (MySQL, MSSQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle)
Integrated Debugger (both local and remote) 
Publishing (WebDAV, FTP and SFTP)
SOAP Wizard
Integrated Help System
CVS Integration
Advanced customization features
Profiling
HTML validators
Code Formatter
Support for Telnet and SSH terminals
Let me tell you about some of the above listed and hopefully it will give you a clear idea about NuSphere PhpED 4.
Code Editor 

The newly released PhpED 4 includes true Unicode editor, thus providing the ability to create projects in several natural languages simultaneously. coloring scheme is quit nice, moreover, you can customize it as you wish. Customization appears to be the core point of this IDE. All the menus and buttons can be moved all around the workspace.. It resambles MS Office products in this respect. Impressive.
 Built-in web-browser allows you to execute your scripts and view results as html code or rendered page without leaving PhpED. 

Code Insight 

When developing a large project, small silly mistakes such as not closing tags or misspelling functions or attributes always appear. Finding and fixing those minors takes a lot of time and effort. PhpED provides assistance here with its Instant Error Analysis that underlines PHP syntax errors and, for example, unclosed tags for HTML. Code Insight set of features also helps to minimize errors. It dynamically provides the available properties and methods for a given variable or class, and automatically concludes partially typed keywords, Code Explorer shows functions and methods with list of arguments they expect. During debug sessions, Tooltips display popups on Function Arguments, Breakpoints, and Evaluated Expressions contained in the code. 

It also worth mentioning that Code Insight is fully customizable too. You can configure it as you wish. 
 
Database support.

Nowadays it's hard to imagine a good web site not integrated with a database. That's why it's a usual thing for a developer to jump constantly from the SQL analyzer to the editor. Is it not annoying? I would say "yes, it is". Fortunately, PhpED lets you browse databases, run SQL queries and work with database content without leaving the IDE. Moreover, you can create forms to view, modify, and update database tables using built-in DB Wizard.

Debugging

Debuger is a core component in the development curve, because no matter how experienced and careful you are, there still will be a lot to debug. PhpED' Integrated Debugger provides both local and remote debugging which is a "must" when developing server-side scripts. 

Tried out on Php-Nuke project, PhpED proved that it really can work fast and throughout. You may view PHP, HTML, and browser output, as well as watching global and local variables. Breakpoints are also supported.

Profiler 

The profiler acts as a monitor of the code performance. This feature will find the bottlenecks that are normally left unnoticed. I included the screenshot of profiler working above. This is a rock! I've found stacky places in my address book scripts in less than one hour (withouth the profiler it would take me weeks).

 In other words, it will let you see where code runs slowly, track code execution time per hit, number of hits, and total time spent while executing each particular line, function or module.
 
The Profiler also shows charts that will illustrate the total execution time and time per hit. Saved profiling history provides a clear view at performance improvement from session to session.

Publishing

PhpED offers a variety of publishing options. You can publish your scripts through FTP, SFTP or WebDAV and use SSL for encryption. A lot of time is being saved because publishing works in the background. 

These above were PROs, now come the CONTRAs:
 No Code Collapsing. Sadly, but so. Hopefully, it will be implemented sometime in the future.
 No proper localization. You can add manuals in other languages to your help system, true, but the interface itself cannot be localized.
 No Code Snippets. One could expect that much from such a good product, but no.

Generally, I would recommend PhpED 4 for intermediate to expert developers, for whom development time is of the essence.

Product's homepage: www.nusphere.com