NetBeans 6.7 and PHP/Symfony – a perfect couple
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.


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.
Software developer, Open Source enthusiast, Linux lover and student at Gdańsk University Of Technology.
Feel free to check me out on Twitter @karolsojko