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Ask HN: php development environment

10 pointstbarbugli13 comments

After 10 years I am going back to PHP, good suggestion to make this soft anyone? (Coming from web development with Ruby and Python)

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I've just started back with PHP as well, and nice things I've seen that didn't exist when I last did PHP in 2006 are:

Composer - a dependency manager that's a lot like Bundler.

Pimple - a dependency injection framework.

Klein - a routing library that's much nicer than handling routes in Apache or working with requests directly.

As for an editor, I've just been using Eclipse with the PHP development tools. I'm sure there is a better tool out there, this was just the first thing I grabbed.

If you're gonna use an IDE then certainly check out phpStorm. I'm a big fan of vim but testing phpStorm made me doubt my ways.

phpStorm and some of the other JetBrains tools are nice, clunky (on lower end machines) but nice.

Phpstorm is highly recommended for larger projects.

Another great IDE is PHPEd. Its is Windows only but I love its debugging and profiling capabilities.

I run Laravel myself. It's an awesome framework (composer is included, as are things like a CLI and the Eloquent ORM to make things easier for you), with great support and documentation. It's as easy and verbose like RoR, only with laravel it's absolutely clear what's going on inside the framework. Their API is stupid simple, for instance.

I could go on for hours, but I highly, highly recommend it, especially coming from Ruby.

You're going to want to check out Laravel.

Laracasts.com is a great place to get up to speed. https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-from-scratch https://laracasts.com/series/digging-in

For a dev environment I would use a vagrant box. Take a look at puphpet.com

Framework-wise I'd recommend checking out Laravel.

What made you come back to PHP after such a long time? I have seen many people running from PHP to ruby or python. Please share your experience.

thank you

Facebook seems to be having a fair amount of success using the HipHop VM (http://hhvm.com). Seems to have support for most of the PHP frameworks I've heard are worth using recently. Just curious, why the move to PHP? I've been having wild fun with Node.js and Golang.

ampps for windows is a good dev environment, or debian just do nginx or apache stacks, i also second laravel if you come from rails it maps to rails very closely, and has awesome support and mind share.

tbarbugli, usually is the other way around, can you tell us why you coming back to PHP after Ruby/Python ? Personally, I'd suggest you checking Laravel (Framework).

Check out: Symfony2 and Zend Framework 2

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