Unfortunately, I couldn't get debugging PHP to work. I liked the idea of quick integration with S3, LightSail, and all the other AWS services. I thought this would be ideal, since AWS is AWS. Then I spent quite a while with AWS Cloud9. Clearly, while Eclipse and CodeEnvy are powerful, they're too time-consuming to solve the problem. While some developers tune their development environments over the course of months or years, I need to be able to get in and get out. That's a rarity.īut after about four hours trying to get their default stacks to spin up with all the right configurations and work, I gave up. CodeEnvy actually has documentation on getting Zend and Xdebug working. CodeEnvy is based on Eclipse Che, a cloud-based version of the very powerful Eclipse IDE (interactive development environment). Read also: Developer documentation: How to get it right It understands PHP syntax, but if you want to debug something, you have to drop in the equivalent of print statements throughout your code. But it has absolutely no debugging support for PHP. And every six months or so, I come away disappointed.ĬodeAnywhere has a number of wonderful features, including letting you store your source code in Google Drive or Dropbox. Cloud-based IDEs (and their limitations)Įvery six months or so, I take a run at the various cloud coding environments to see if they finally support PHP debugging. They have to execute code both locally and remotely, sometimes they have to set up an SSH channel to communicate debugging info, and they often require lots of configuration tweaks that are unique to every coding environment and every host. But even in the best of times, they're hard to setup and very fiddly.

When they work, they're both really excellent.

There are two main debugging engines for PHP: Xdebug and Zend.

This is the core language that WordPress runs, and my donations system runs inside of WordPress. While part of my donations engine is in JavaScript, the bulk is in PHP. As a result, cloud-based coding environments have no problem providing JavaScript debugging. JavaScript is run in the browser, so when you inspect a web page element, you can often get to the debugger. Every modern browser has a built-in JavaScript debugger.

Best php ide in 2016