I think it's quite amazing how far the PHP and MySQL combination of apps have come in the past 2-3 years. They both started from humble beginnings, yet today they are arguably the most popular scripting and database combination for new programmers to learn. In this article, John takes a look at PHPEd and talks about its interface, installer, and his overall opinion of it as an IDE for developing PHP scripts.
Review: NuSphere PHPEd - PHPEd in review (contd.) (Page 3 of 4 )
As mentioned earlier, you can just as easily create JavaScripts with PHPEd. If you don't have much experience with JavaScript, then PHPEd's "JS" tab might be just the thing for you. It contains a tree view list of every JavaScript function. To add the code for any of these JavaScript functions to your code, you simply double-click on the one you want and PHPEd takes care of the rest:
The last (and most important) feature that I want to talk about is PHPEd's built-in debugging support. If you're working with a variable and want to see it's current value at any point in your code, you simply highlight it, and PHPEd will show a tool tip with its current value, like this:
Another debugging feature of PHPEd is its code debug-and-display feature. We can pass a snippet of our code to the debugger, which displays the results in PHPEd's built in browser window. To do this, we simply select the piece of code that we want to debug and then click on the Run -> Run In Debugger menu item, or press the F5 function key.
Just like in Visual Basic, we can also set break points, run code up to a certain line, step over, into and out of code, and add variable watch points to our code. All of these options are accessible from the Run menu:
When you've created your site and are ready to upload it, PHPEd comes to the rescue with its built-in FTP manager. It's literally a two-click process to connect to your web server via FTP: one click to edit your account details, and another to actually connect to your server.
You can also use PHPEd's built-in FTP manager to open remote files locally. This is a great time saver if you’re constantly changing files on your remote web server.