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I have become an Eclipse convert. Eclipse is an IDE which I use to develope my PHP projects. Eclipse is open source and free, and has too many features to even begin listing. It also has a myriad of modules supporting language specific extensions and support for programmer tools like CVS.

I've also been using the PHPeclipse extension, which adds a number of nice PHP specific features and in eclipse terminology, an eclipse perspective, which is especially useful if you develope in an all-in-one environment with a local apache and php instance on your workstation. This allows you to iterate rapidly, as your changes can be instantly examined in the docked browser window, and ostensibly give's one access to php's debugging hooks. I'll admit I've never tried this, although having a debugger available is always a nice feature for any platform.

The main things I want out of PHPeclipse are color syntax hilighting, a class and function browser window that makes it quick to jump around inside your code, and PHP functionn prototypes so I know what the argument list is for all those useful built-ins like substr and array_sort, all of which you get with PHPEclipse. The class browser works well, except that it's not smart enough to resolve includes, and for this reason, rarely has visibility into the classes you're using because they're in their own class file. You can always open these in a seperate source window of course, as your workspace you can have numerous files open, all easily accessible from tabs.

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