23rd World

Nothing amazing going on, just a few tips that might save you some time:

• You need java runtime installed and working, prolly apt-cache search to make
  sure you’re putting in the most recent version (6 as of this writing)
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-font
• The netbeans in the repo is for the Java IDE, so don’t bother with apt-get
• Download the install file here: http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/index.html
  • Be sure to pick the PHP bundle
• If clicking on the netbeans-x.x-ml-php-linux.sh file gives you an error or tries to open in gedit or something, right-click > properties > permissions and check ‘allow executing file as a program’
• Select Run (not ‘Run in Terminal’), running in terminal will throw some GTK errors

Next you might want to head over to the Netbeans website and watch the intro vid and orient yourself to the plethora of PHP-centric features.

As fair newb to programming in PHP I can’t say I’m qualified to suggest an IDE. So why Netbeans? It’s free. It porvides syntactic and semantic code highlighting for PHP and debugging through Xdebug. Folks in my Seattle PHP meetup group who know a lot more about programming than I do seem to really like it, every time I go to install Eclipse I am daunted by the website, instructions and innumerable options. Finally, it was recommended in the recent Smashing Magazine article The Big PHP IDE Test: Why Use One And Which To Choose (2009.02.11) so I stopped resisting.

Do you like it, recommend others over it?