An abundance of terrific tools for PHP development makes it extremely difficult to pick "the best." Eclipse PDT, NetBeans IDE for PHP, NuSphere PhpED, and Zend Studio all earned high marks in our review, while the two top scorers -- Eclipse PDT and Zend Studio, both of which are based on Eclipse -- share many of the same advantages: the Data Tools Platform for managing databases; bundled plug-ins for JavaScript development, Web development tools, and XML editors; the Zend debugger; excellent coding assistance for HTML, PHP, and JavaScript; and the ability to load the IDE with more tools than you could possibly know what to do with. While Eclipse PDT is free, and Zend Studio is not, Zend Studio's tight integration with Zend Server make executing, debugging, and profiling PHP applications a breeze. In short, both of these do-it-all PHP IDEs are winners.
