PHP again hits the spotlight as we try to find a good PHP IDE with visual design capabilities. For example Nusphere PHPEdit has great editor, debugger, and even some basic code generation wizards – but no Visual Design tool. Ditto for Zend Studio and Activestate Komodo.
Now some will argue that Visual Design with drag and drop facility is the work of the Lazy Devil – to which anyone who has had to make the thousand and first change(s) to a systems presentation pages or look and feel using the editor only approach …. maybe there is a better way – something like visual design.
Now dont get me wrong – I really like the editors, debuggers, profilers, plus context sensitive code coloring, code completion and help that many PHP system offer. But one thing that has held JavaScript and AJAX back has been the lack of a cross platform IDE (Microsofts Visual Studios JScript flunks the test on two scores -it is not cross platform and generates highly proprietary code). For awhile, Borland had IntraBuilder which was quite promising but Borland gave up on the IDEa. Now this is patently strange because the ASP, JSP, JSP as Struts, JSF, and AJAX powered JavaScript all have robust Visual IDEs either as stand alone tools or part of the Eclipse or NetBeans toolsets.
So as I search unsuccessfully for a PHP IDE with Visual Design capabilities (please send any and all help here) I have started to look for the next best thing – PHP code generation tools. Here is one of my first hits – Xlinesofts PHPRunner. this tool, as you can see from the screenshot (again we use the Wordweb database in MySQL format), is able to produce very sophisticated ECUD-Edit, Copy, Update, Delete code for database tables. And not just MySQL, but also Oracle, Access, and a broad set of ODBC. This tool makes short work of the drudge patrol – editing and maintaining proliferating databases. And if you have a favorite PHP code generation tool send me a note.
(c)JBSurveyer 2006
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