Great IDE for PHP Development - perhaps the best
August 09, 2018

Great IDE for PHP Development - perhaps the best

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PhpStorm

We use PhpStorm when debugging our PHP web-apps. It's a great IDE that helps pinpoint errors in the code via compliation, syntax highlighting & various other code inspecting features. It allows you to connect to a remote host, pulling the files directly from your server to the IDE and putting your edited files directly on to the server. Currently in our department a few developers use it when we come accross our PHP heavy frameworks like Cake or Twig.
  • Database browsing, Remote host browsing, and all the deep seated customizations for both the UI and Technical feasability are the result of an amazing integrity and compatibility with most components and technologies.
  • The built-in shell is insanely helpful for traversing code in order to debug scripts with ease, and the plug-in system makes this software quite extensible.
  • Not to mention the variety of options and settings (divided into global settings and per-project settings) are both intuitive & easy to use, especially the fact that I can export and import them across my workstations while maintaining my spacing & indentation, highlighting, inspection patterns and syntax styling.
  • So overall I love PhpStorm but there are some glaring Javascript issues that need to be addressed. The variable and function usage search often yields unrelated results. The declarations sometimes screw up & the validation can sometimes be buggy.
  • The learning curve for utilizing all of its core components & extensible features is steep. If you're coming from Sublime Text 3/Atom, you might have a tough time getting used to this heavier IDE.
  • High Memory Usage. I know its a heavier IDE with alot of cool components, but maybe through some sort of multithreading it could utilize my GPU more efficiently?
  • Theres a steep learning curve, so developers who don't put the time in don't really get alot out of it.
  • Other than that, PhpStorm has proved a valuable software to use on the engineering team.
PhpStorm has a free trial. Visual Studio IDE does not. I believe that VSIDE is better suited for C+/.NET development and not PHP. Despite their PHP plugins & debugger, stepping through the code on PhpStorm always feels better and more intuitive than stepping through PHP with VSCode.
PhpStorm is well suited for any PHP development. It integrates well with Symfony, Laravel, CodeIgniter, Cake & Twig. I have used it very successfully in the past and despite not being my go-to editor, I will still use it when working on PHP heavy frameworks.