PHP Development Tools Awesomeness

The PHP Development Tools (PDT) Project has been hard at work producing the next version of some excellent tools for building PHP applications. I have been using the 1.0M1 release (the PDT downloads page points to their update site) for a few weeks now and am really impressed. Here’s a screenshot of my workspace in action:

The editor (top center) does the syntax highlighting and code-completion that I’ve come to love (the screenshot shows the code completion in action. The PHP Project Outline view (lower left) shows all the constants, classes, and functions defined in the currently selected project (or the project containing the current selection). The PHP Functions view shows the available built-in PHP functions available; you can right-click on a function and select “Open Manual” to show the documentation for that function (bottom center).

You can launch the file you’re editing directly from the editor, or can select a file and launch it from the Navigator or PHP Explorer view.

The next release, 1.0M2 is expected on July 30th. This is a great date, as it will give you something to be excited about after the excitement of the new Harry Potter book starts to ebb.

Update! I incorrectly indicated the version number as 2.0M1/2.0M2. It is, of course, 1.0M1/1.0M2.