Yesterday I received a message in my inbox that I had not seen in quite some time:
“New Release of PhpED. 5.9.5 is here”
Over my 2+ years as a PhpED Professional subscriber, I like most became accustomed to regular updates. Be they bugfixes, features, or even just browser and debugger updates – I could be pretty safe in betting on a release every 2-3 weeks. But such has not been the case as of late, and the lack of activity prompted a thread on the NuSphere community forums titled “Future of PHPEd“. Ominous, yes, but a thread that began sour with complaints quickly turned mushy-sweet when NuSphere Customer Support team member gitmans assured everyone that development was very active for PhpED version 6.0! Nice!
But what happened to the Prado integration project? Broken support for auto-complete of Prado template tags? Prado support has been a topic of interest by the NuSphere community, perhaps second only to better JavaScript support. But through the same thread, we were made aware that NuSphere is working with some key users to ensure support of Prado going forward. I have felt that this is a key component of PhpED’s future success, and I am very glad to see them working on this. Full RAD integration may be a way off, but strong support of Prado tags is a huge advantage over competing IDEs.
So on to the release!
PhpED 5.9.5 is an effort by the NuSphere team to deliver on some long-withheld features for front-end development, including:
- Per-project Debugger settings – very cool!
- Debug client now automatically handles communication through a NAT firewall
- Auto-highlight of variables within a document – may not be fully limited to variable scope
- Auto close HTML Tags
- Auto-complete handles HTML attributes
These last few features have become the norm for me at my job, where I use Netbeans as my primary IDE. While Netbeans has handled HTML tags and attributes for quite some time, PhpED has been having to play catch-up a bit. This is due to its original intent (and primary purpose) to be a PHP editor. But, as web ‘development’ often handles both front and back end work, it is good to see better support for the front-end tools and languages.
I am definitely looking forward to using these new features, and will continue to recommend PhpED as the go-to solution for PHP-based web development. Good work NuSphere!
