Eclipse

Eclipse is a Java oriented IDE, but one which is increasingly useful in my main line of work: PHP.

I recently moved wholesale from Dreamweaver to Eclipse (not by choice but by commerical necessity) and have found myself in a whole new world, one which I've pretty much ignored up until now. If I'd moved to Eclipse a year ago (when the PHP elements started to become useful) I really do think I would have been both more productive and also a better coder.

The main thing Eclipse has which Dreamweaver doesn't is code inspection and completion.

Example:
I have a class, such as:

class Basket
{
public $items;
}


In Dreamweaver, I'd need to remember that there is an attribute "$items" in Basket when typing $basket->items. But Eclipse knows about $items for me, and will hint to me that it's there when I type "$basket->". If I type "$basket->i", I can immediately hit tab to complete the line.

I've used these sorts of IDEs before (many years before, in fact) but had never even considered that it might apply to PHP. There are other major wins for Eclipse too, such as the SVN integration. This is massively more reliable than using Tortoise in the Windows shell as it will always ensure directory deletes and renames are notified to SVN. I usually remember to do these things myself, but there's more than just me in my team and I have spent a great many hours fixing SVN repositories after people have broken their directory layouts.