The perfect storm of PHP development tools.
March 29, 2019
The perfect storm of PHP development tools.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with PhpStorm
PhpStorm is being used by a handful of developers in our organization. We needed a product for the development of various PHP projects and PhpStorm is the best IDE for PHP/web development on the market in my opinion. Because of the plethora of great features Phpstorm offers, it really is an all in one solution for development. In most cases, it solves the problem of requiring multiple tools to complete a task.
- The text editor is second to none and highly configurable.
- It's very easy to personalize the settings to fit your needs. Anything from keybindings, preferred color schemes, fonts, desired code format, and code inspections can be controlled through the settings.
- Phpstorm does a very good job of saving, importing, exporting settings so upgrading your Phpstorm version doesn't require you to redo all your settings. This is also beneficial if you are setting up Phpstorm on another computer or sharing your company coding style guide with other developers. Simply export as much or as little of your settings as you'd like, then import them on another machine.
- Development Tooling: Phpstorm not only helps you write better code through the various code inspections it performs but it also helps you manage your code with built-in deployment and version control tools. In addition, you no longer require a separate tool for interacting with a database, you can execute your query directly from the text editor or open up a database console in a new tab to query the database(s).
- I would like to see builtin support for NoSQL databases, particularly Redis. I know there are community plugins that provide a solution for this but I really would like to see PhpStorm handle NoSQL natively.
- I would like to see a more fully fleshed out Git client implementation. I really think that if they spent a little more time on it they could provide a tool that would rival other competitors like GitKraken, Sourcetree, or SmartGit.
- More productive developers. Developers have the most of the tools they in a single well-designed package.
- Cleaner code. Regardless of how you feel about IDEs that do code inspections, PhpStorm well help you and your staff produce higher quality code.
- Cost efficient. PhpStorm is not all that expensive when compared to other similar products but it provides a more complete solution. If you have PhpStorm you don't need to spend money on other tools such as a database client or git client. You can easily build a product from start to finish using just this tool.
- Eclipse
- Komodo Edit
- Komodo IDE
- Visual Studio IDE
- Microsoft Visual Studio Code
- Sublime Text
- Notepad++
- NetBeans
- Atom
Each one of the products I've listed are great in their own right, but non of them provide as complete a solution as PhpStorm in my opinion. Very few products offer all of the features that PhpStorm does and those that do don't have the greatest performance in my experience. Some have a great text editor but lack other critical features while others have a bounty of features, but the text editor is garbage. Before I tried PhpStorm, I stuck to using simple text editors because the features the IDEs offered didn't outweigh performance hit of running such a large, slow program. PhpStorm isn't lightweight by any means but I haven't noticed any of the common performance issues that I experienced with other IDEs.