Review - NuSphere's PHPEd

Recently, NuSphere released PHPEd as the PHP Development Environment for the enterprise developer. As NuSphere say,

I thought I'd take it for a spin...

The Install

My initial impression of PHPEd was "wow". The installer came complete with all the applications needed to create, test, debug, secure and deploy PHP + MySQL Websites: Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl, NuSphereMail, MyODBC, MySQL JDBC, CVS, NuSphere security console and the actual PHPEd IDE itself.

The installation program existed completely inside a Web browser window, and it took around 10 minutes to install and configure everything mentioned above. I already had MySQL installed, so the installation program cleverly detected this and skipped it.

Working With PHPEd

Once everything was installed, I fired up PHPEd via the start menu. I was greeted with the PHPEd IDE, which looks like this:

Clicking on the File -> New menu option gave me the choice of eight new document types: HTML file, include file, JavaScript file, Perl file, PHP file, Python file, SQL file, and text file. Because PHPEd is primarily a PHP script editing IDE, I chose to create a new PHP file.

I went about creating a new PHP document to connect to my locally installed copy of MySQL. As with many other IDE's, my code was colored according to syntax, comments, etc. One great thing I noticed was the built-in syntax suggestion tool. To use it, you simply type the start of a PHP function name, such as "mysql_con" and PHPEd displays its syntax suggestions for the way that you should call the function:

Also, when you're typing the name of a function to call in your PHP script, but aren't too sure what its name is, PHPEd will display a list of functions whose first letters are similar to those you've typed in so far. They're displayed in a floating list box that resembles the way Microsoft has implemented its intellisense feature in both Visual Basic and C++:

As you can see in the example above, I've created four variables. Each time I pressed the "$" key at the start of the variable name, PHPEd displayed a list of variables currently declared throughout the PHP script I was writing. This is a handy feature and helps minimize incorrect name referencing of variables.