NetBeans for PHP

Announcements

First let me announce the availability of NetBeans IDE 6.7!

I would like to thank everyone who helped us to make the IDE better. Thanks for every reported issue, comment or contributed fix. To learn more about NetBeans IDE 6.7 please use the following resources:

• Download NetBeans http://www.netbeans.org/downloads
  
• Videos about NetBeans IDE 6.7 http://www.netbeans.org/kb/docs/intro-screencasts.html
• Features of NetBeans IDE 6.7 http://www.netbeans.org/features/
• General information about the NetBeans: http://www.netbeans.org/

Second announcement is that long awaited PHP 5.3.0 is released!

PHP 5.3.0 brings new feautures and bug fixes. See announcement for more details. NetBeans IDE 6.8 will bring support for PHP 5.3.0.  For everyone who is eager to play with new features I can recommend to download one of latest PHP daily builds and try our current support. You may be pleasantly surprised and we are curious about your feedback. Definitely you can expect more blog entries announcing individual features in the couple of next weeks.

Code Navigation Improvements

When you work on a project, you need to navigate round the source code frequently.  NetBeans  IDE provides many navigation features that are highly useful since 6.5 but there were additional improvements and fixes in 6.7 that are worth of mentioning.

PHP Application from Remote Server

How to Include File

How to include file in PHP NB IDE? Two ways:

1. file system code completion for include/require
2. Fast Import Alt+Shift-I
   

Introduce Variable QuickFix

Remote Synchronization

Many of you would like to have remote synchronization for your PHP projects - well, let's have a look what we have done.

NetBeans IDE 6.7 Milestone 3 (M3) Available

NetBeans IDE 6.7 Milestone 3 (M3) was announced. Read the complete list of NetBeans IDE 6.7 Milestone 3 features and enhancements.

Path Mapping In PHP Debugger

In this entry I would like to announce manual Path Mapping for remote debugging. Since NB6.5 it has been possible to debug both scripts and web pages, and web pages can be debugged either Locally or Remotely. For Remote Debugging, unfortunately the debugged php file on the remote server isn't the same as the file opened in NetBeans IDE running on a local machine. Debugger support in NetBeans must thus be able to map server paths to local paths, take into account that the server and client might run on different OS platform, cannot rely that the initially debugged file is really the debugged one because of rewrite rules, prepend files... Many more factors could be mentioned here but it means that path mapping cannot be resolved automatically for every individual scenario. That's the reason why for 6.7 we added the possibility to manually define path mapping through project setup for individual run configurations. In the next screenshot is a declaration for mapping from a Windows server path to a Linux local path. 

Together with manual path mapping, two additional choices were added. The first one, "Ask Every Time," lets you choose the URL yourself just before the debugging session is started (see next screenshot). The second one, "Do Not Open Web Browser," only starts the debugging session and expects you to open your web browser and browse the URL yourself - anyway GET (or POST) variable XDEBUG_SESSION_START is needed.

Output Window improvements

Today, I would like to inform that we have improved output of PHP scripts which is displayed directly in the IDE (using the Output Window component). The improvements are small but very useful I hope - now, one is able to navigate to a file which appears in:

• PHP script output:
  
  
• test runner UI:
  
  
• PHPUnit text output:
  
  

And as always, feel free to test it or file an issue if any problem appears.

That's all for today but stay tuned, Radek will blog about PHP debugger improvements soon.

Frustrated by your PHP configuration?

There is now an alternative to setting up your own PHP environment. You can download a server-only OpenSolaris web stack and run it in
a virtual machine. XDebug, the PHP engine, Apache, and MySQL are preconfigured on the web stack. You can work on your PHP project in NetBeans IDE and use the FTP feature to deploy your PHP on the OpenSolaris web stack.

Follow these steps to use the OpenSolaris web stack:

1. Download the OpenSolaris web stack image and create a virtual machine for it.
2. Configure the network connection on the virtual machine.
3. Configure port forwarding.
4. Create an FTP connection in NetBeans for the web stack on the virtual machine.

Selenium plugin for PHP

Thanks to Jindřich Šedek, from now we support Selenium in PHP project - more information can be found on NetBeans wiki.

Code coverage for PHP - why not?

After a few days, we would like to inform you that code coverage for PHP has been added to the NetBeans IDE.

UI for PHPUnit support

Fwd: Code Completion for the Kohana & Code-igniter Frameworks

How to achieve PHP code completion in Netbeans for the CodeIgniter, Kohana frameworks? See following articles:

• Netbeans revisited: Code Completion for Code-igniter II

• Netbeans: Code Completion for the Kohana Framework

Mac users: MAMP now recommended, not XAMPP

Dear Mac users,

There have been a number of issues with configuring XAMP on the Mac for use with NetBeans IDE, most significantly that XAMP sets the owners of MySQL databases to "nobody", blocking Apache access. Therefore I have changed the Mac OS setup tutorial to use MAMP instead of XAMP. In my opinion, the MAMP setup is more straightforward than the one for XAMP, anyway.