Today, Zend released the latest beta version of their Zend Studio application. Zend Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for PHP developers. Although the software usually requires a commercial support license (which currently runs $399 for one year or $717 for three years), the beta version of Zend Studio 7.0 is available as a free trial download for the time being.
Earlier this week, Smashing Magazine put together a fantastic resource for PHP developers. The post is a list of “50 Extremely Useful PHP Tools.” The categories covered in the post are:
Debugging Tools
Testing and Optimization Tools
Documentation Tools
Security Tools
Image Manipulation and Graphs
PHP Code Beautifier
Version-Control Systems (though, according to the comments, the tools listed in this section arguably do not belong there)
Useful Extensions, Utilities and Classes
PHP Online Tools and Resources
In-Browser Tools (Firefox Add-Ons)
Frameworks for PHP
PHP IDEs and Editors
Sources and Resources
The descriptions of some of the tools in the article could have been a little better, as I don’t even understand what some of the tools are designed to do. However, there are quite a few interesting items in the list. I will definitely be trying some of them over the next few months to see how they work and what they might be able to do for me.