thehippy

Coming off Eclipse PDT then NetBeans to phpStorm has been a pleasure. NetBeans took a great deal for me to setup the way I wanted it to work, debugger, command line php tools, et cetera. phpStorm on the other hand is about as ready to go as an IDE can be, notably has integration with PHPUnit, phing, phpdoc and github, has good XML tools and works as a JS editor. If you find NetBeans a bit of a memory hog, phpStorm is a bit better and more responsive, not as good as the jump from Eclipse to NetBeans, but noticeable none the less. The code inspection is much more robust in phpStorm, not only will it autocomplete down to the array key but it does a fantastic job in mixed code situations (PHP, HTML, and JS all in the same view for instance). Another thing that not everyone will take into account is that the devs are fairly responsive with bugs, their tracker is public and things tend to get attention quickly. Feature requests on the other hand seem to take a major version release or someone to write a plugin as a work around. The downside is the extra functionality phpStorm provides might not be worth it, NetBeans is free and phpStorm is $100-200 USD, you'll really have to give the trial a shot and see if its worth it to you. Having my IDE be less of a headache made purchasing a license worth it to me, though I haven't upgraded to 3.0 yet which was only released a couple of days ago.

Been using NetBeans for awhile but I thought I'd give JetBrains PHPStorm a try. Its a very nice product, quick, excellent code completion and does double duty as a js/css IDE which I find myself using more and more lately. I may actually pay for an IDE, didn't think I'd ever say that. JetBrains made IntelliJ IDEA the Java IDE if anyone is familiar with it, good quality products out of that company.