Do you know the feeling when you look at your screen waiting for the project to build its workspace for hours or when you have to search the whole project in order to find a simple function ? If you do I recommend trying NetBeans as your primary IDE.

Although NetBeans has a wide range of supported languages ( Java, Ruby, C/C++, PHP) it comes in a simple and compact enviorment. If you’re interested only in one of the mentioned technologies then it’s not a problem to download a NetBeans dedicated version for only that solution.

As a PHP developer I found NetBeans very helpful from the moment they included PHP support in it. Now as the NetBeans 6.7 has seen the light of day I am more than satisfied with the improvement of my working process thanks to NetBeans.

So what are the benefits ?

• Speed (!) – first of all NetBeans has an amazing speed for a big IDE. The indexing of a big PHP project  (~400 MB) took me about 5 minutes whereas for Eclipse it was about an hour with fingers crossed that it won’t crash.
• code completion, code completion, code completion ( a little bit too Steve Ballmer there ) – this is probably the highlight of NetBeans for PHP. The code completion is really outstanding, covers all the constructors’ suggestions and hints. It includes the latest declared variables in a newly created constructor or function call. Try it out yourself !
• The Memory – back in the time I was very disappointed with Eclipse IDE because it started getting slower and slower with each and every project I did. This was a big issue for me and  probably still is for the majority of PHP developers out there. So when I switched to NetBeans I was positivly shocked how it doesn’t slow down even after months of usage.
• NetBeans 6.7 provides many crucial benefits that make it stand out in the field of PHP IDE. Just to name a few, it’s got SQL code completion, marking returns, parameter info, getter and setter generator, code coverage, PHP path mapping, Selenium for testing your applications and many, many more.

Besides, NetBeans is simply great to work with. It has a nice glossy and shiny look which is important as well to to make you feel  comfortable and motivated. It supports MySQL servers and Bugzilla which you can manage from the IDE. At GOYELLO we work mostly with Symfony framework and NetBeans handles it very well ( e.g. support for YAML files, not to mention the code completion, again ) so this is a perfect solution for all you symfonians out there.

If you’re a social networks freek you’ll be delighted to find that this IDE has many built in drag-and-drop features from most of the network services API e.g. Twitter.

Download it today for free and have fun developing PHP applications.