The IDE being strictly project-oriented means it indexes your entire project (all of your include_path as well if set), and offers full-fledged autocompletion with documentation for all the classes bound to your project, namespaces and all. The second downside also doubles as an advantage. If you have a specific set of rules for every project, if you have coding styles and enforce PSR standards, if you have include paths that are identical across platforms but are a pain to set up over and over again, all you need to do is load the configuration from the originally configured PhpStorm and you’re good to go.
This alone is worth looking at as a deciding factor in the purchase, as it allows you to carry your development environment with you. It lets us use the IDE on every development platform we own. Notable Featuresīut while I mentioned being built on Java as a downside, it’s also a huge-advantage. And new projects must be opened in a new window – there’s only one IDE instance per open project. Certainly, you can edit a PHP file, but it’ll get opened under the project you have opened at that time. It emphasizes speed, productivity, and ease of access to the entire project, and as such, offers no actual support for individual PHP file editing in the traditional sense.
This is a professional IDE designed for heavy coders who develop large applications and professional platforms. You need to define a project and tell the IDE which files are included in it. Blazing fast.įurthermore, PhpStorm is a project-based IDE, which means there’s no simply editing just one file. Using Java comes with a big perk though – PhpStorm is fast. Coupled with the IDE’s rich functionality, this resource demand might prove to be too much for weaker machines. Java is a dinosaur language and the VM which needs to spin up to execute Java apps is one of the greatest memory and CPU hogs – especially when working in an OSX environment. Let’s get them out of the way first.įirst and foremost, PhpStorm is built on Java. Now, this wouldn’t be a good review if I didn’t mention some downsides, but luckily these are few and far between and, as you’ll see below, aren’t show-stoppers. It’s a stripped down version of IntelliJ with added PHP support – something IntelliJ needs to have manually enabled via a plugin. PhpStorm is a Java-based IDE developed by Jetbrains, derived from a master multi-programming-language IDE called IntelliJ IDEA. Both will get the job done, but productivity-wise, one is obviously a better choice than the other. Ok, enough analogies, I’m talking about using a text editor versus using a full-fledged PHP-dedicated project-oriented IDE for PHP application development. Some of our foreheads may have gone hard with constant hammering while programming, but that doesn’t mean its a better tool than the never before used hammer. It’s said the tool doesn’t make the craft – a carpenter can drive a nail into a wooden plank using a hammer, a rock, another plank, or his forehead, but he’ll rarely choose anything other than the hammer.