All too often I come across beginning PHP tutorials in which the author praises the ease in which newbies can get acquainted with the language, and invites them to fire up their favorite text editor to begin coding. Because so many newcomers begin coding PHP on Windows, often this text editor is Notepad. Last time I checked, Notepad offered nothing by way of coding convenience, nor a means for extending the application to allow for such amenities.

Why not point newcomers to a tool that will help these individuals get further acquainted with PHP without getting lost in unnecessary organizational details such as tabbing between multiple windows (most notably editor and browser), having to hunt down missing quotation marks, and in the case of having a significant bug, being left to simple echo statements?

PHPEclipse, is an open source PHP editor built on top of Eclipse. and offering an amazing array of features which will greatly reduce coding time. A few of my favorite PHPEclipse features follow:

• Continuous review of script execution within embedded browser window. That’s right, no more tabbing between windows.
• Code completion, allowing you to quickly recall and insert any of thousands of built-in PHP functions
• Custom coding templates, eliminating the need to constantly recreate repetitive skeletons
• Syntax coloring, optional line numbering, automatic closing of quotations, brackets, and parenthesis

So if you’re a newcomer to the world of PHP, or a long-time developer still hanging onto some rather outdated editing tools, check out PHPEclipse!