IDE suggestions?

[eluser]mrh[/eluser]
Hello all,

For my employer I work on a Mac since we do both Mac and PC based bio-medical device code. PHP is fairly new and I'm doing a project in CI currently and I see several additional projects coming up.

Having not done much PHP I'm learning as I go. I need some recommendations on an IDE. I'm hoping to get a setup where I can step-debug various routines as I develop in CI. Any recommendations or is what I'm asking sort of out of line? I used to environments like Xcode, Delphi, VC++ etc.

I currently have MAMP running and develop in the htdocs directory which seems like a fast way to test but not sure if this way can be used for debugging.

So far I've looked at:

Komodo IDE - Seems ok but it wasn't obvious how to setup for debugging if even possible
Zend Studio - Seems very cool and looks to have debugger stuff but not sure if that is specific to their Zend Server or not
textmate - Currently own this and while it's cool I can't see that it can really run and do breakpoints.

I don't mind spending a few $$ on a nice environment, for example right now I'm on a trial of Zend Studio. For the $299 price I'd hope it does a little more than just give me access to PHP docs. So far I've been unsuccessful in debugging with it and the tutorials on their site seems oriented towards Zend Server.

Anyway any info you can suggest would be super! Thanks in advance!

[eluser]umefarooq[/eluser]
simple answer use netbeans for php its free

[url href="http://netbeans.org/"]http://netbeans.org/[/url]

[eluser]TWP Marketing[/eluser]

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I currently have MAMP running and develop in the htdocs directory which seems like a fast way to test but not sure if this way can be used for debugging.
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Just a thought, I develop (write) code in a separate directory and copy (sftp, filzilla, etc.) to the server directory (for instance; htdocs/yoursite...) to test the code. That way I have a backup in case either get hosed. It also allows me to keep notes and other, non-site, files with my dev code, rather than having to open a separate set of folders.

[eluser]CroNiX[/eluser]
Zend Studio is not specific to Zend Server, but does integrate with it. I use it for CI and is my IDE of choice.

There are a few anomalies when using the debugger with CI, but that's because of how CI is written.
You can't use the debugger on views. (rarely need to anyway)
You can't set a breakpoint in a model and just have it stop there. You need to set the breakpoint in the controller on the line before the call to the model and step into the model (or proceed to the next breakpoint set in the model).

There are also tricks you will need to do if you want to use autocomplete with CI, also due to how CI is written. There are discussions on these forums detailing what needs to be done (pretty easy), like this one.

But yeah, love the debugger and saves me hours of troubleshooting every year, which more than pays for itself with increased productivity. It even works with ajax calls. Just set the browser debug plugin to "next request" and then submit the form or whatever.

If you use Chrome as your development browser, I found a debugger plugin for it here, which works so far. Hopefully Zend will put out an official one eventually.

Also, the license works on both the Mac and PC version, which is great, and the new direct github integration makes things very simple, if you use GH.