Karol Krizka

Today, I had to do some PHP programming on my Windows machine, which I haven’t done in some time. I decided to install a nice and fancy PHP edit (Notepad just didn’t cut it), and after some time I found a promising one called phpDesigner 2007. It had everything I could ask for:

• PHP4 and 5 support
• Automatic syntax highlighting
• Code generation
• FTP Browser
• Support for many other languages

It is a commercial product that costs $39USD, but there is also a 14 day full feature trail which I decided to try.

My experience has not been very good with this editor. First of all the interface was extremely messy and cluttered with different features. It took forever to find what I needed. Next of all, the FTP Browser is just what it says, a browser. It allows one to connect to a FTP server, see what files are there and download them. But after editing, one has to open a separate FTP client and upload via it. Since this was one of my main requirements for a good editor (PHP is installed on a remote server), I decided to end my experience with this editor.

There are a quite a lot of other more advanced features, but they needed me to install additional free tools, like TortioseSVN or FileZilla. This is something I find unacceptable in commercial software. Why should I pay for something just so I have to download additional free software?

Nevertheless, there are some good points in phpDesigner 2007. The syntax highlighting was fabulous, It distinguished between HTML code and PHP in one document without any problems. So if you want to dish out $39 for an over glorified text editor with syntax highlighting, phpDesigner 2007 is the best choice!