I have been a slave to Microsoft development tools for far longer than I care to admit, but have recently purchased a number of sites written in PHP. I am not at all worried about being able to grasp the language and look forward to developing in PHP. My problem is thus: I work on a Windows XP Pro machine and have a Windows 2000 Server for development against. I am looking for hints, tips or outright instructions on the BEST method for getting IIS to play nice such that I can have both classic ASP and PHP sites running on my server and laptop. I have downloaded the PHP executable and installed seemingly without issue. I already have MySQL installed and running nicely as the backend to a number of my ASP sites. What is the best FREE development environment for PHP? If there are install considerations [like the php.ini file ? ] that I should be aware of I'd like advice on that as well. I know there may be a rash of "Google it" -- but sometimes it is just best to ask people directly - and at nearly 1 AM my time this is one them. Thank you in advance for any / all your help.
I find vim is nice for writing php code in. I'm a Linux user (at home) but I believe vim is available for win32, too. I don't know whether it's the best, but it's my personal favourite. The syntax highlighting helps a lot. Otherwise, jedit is supposed to be very good for software/web-dev. php.ini changes are all personal preference, so it's a good idea to read the documentation on php.net, understand the options and choose what's best for you.
Are you asking about code editors? If so, I highly recommend EditPlus (http://www.editplus.com). It contains syntax highlighting, FTP functions and more. I used to use Crimson Editor (http://www.crimsoneditor.com) but then for no reason at all the FTP functions stopped working. Regarding jEdit, there appears to be (at least) 2 different versions. I had used one on my Mac at work, which as projects got more and more complex, jEdit would begin hogging up more system resources. It was basically a fancy Java applet, I believe that's why it didn't work well.
try stuff like phpdev... http://www.firepages.com.au/ Basically it's a simple Apache, Mysql, PHP dev environment that works fairly well for testing and dev. There are a few others out there like this but this is one that I used in the past.
I do not know of any free development tools for PHP in the same sense as Microsoft's Visual development tools. I do most of my development work on Windows with the NoteTab Pro text editor. I also use Apache instead of IIS. But I do not play with ASP and all my live servers are Linux boxes. There is one big gotcha with many of the PHP programs. They want to use the *nix "sendmail" to send email. You will need to rewrite all files so that they use php's mail() to send email. You will also need to edit the php.ini file to include the IP address of the SMTP server php should contact to send email. Many programs written for *nix environments also use file locking. As far as I know PHP for windows, like perl for windows, does not implement this function correctly on windows. One minor syntax difference is to remember when writing paths in PHP on windows, is to use *nix style. For instance c:/mydir/ and not c:\mydir\ Otherwise you need to escape the slashes: c:\\mydir\\ There is some important information about setting up PHP under IIS at the php.net website: http://ca.php.net/manual/en/install.windows.iis.php
If you are asking for a test server, then you try AppServ. This installs all the tools you require to test PHP, but you might have a problem as you have MySQL already installed.
I like to use Text-Pad to create/edit my PHP files, http://www.textpad.com Another option you might consider is running PHP/MySQL off a thumb drive. It requires that you turn off IIS. http://www.chsoftware.net/en/useware/wos/wos.htm I currently use this so I can work on PHP/MySQL apps and .NET/SQL Server apps on the same machine. I just turn IIS off when I want to run PHP and I make sure Apache is off when I turn on IIS. It works out great.
ok this is very simple get wampserver http://www.wampserver.com/en/index.php 1. install by clicking next several times 2. start it 3. if needed right click on icon and choose php4 otherwise it defaults to php5 thats it, type http://localhost in a browser and ull see locahost page now for database i recommend Mysql Navicat 7 its a very powerfull GUI based database management program to program in php get Zend Studio thats the setup i use to develop on my windows xp pro machine and believe me i do ALOT of php, spend several hours a day doing php5 and java once everything is tested i upload securely using winSCP3
As said somewhere above jedit is a good program for software and web development. It's my favourite on the linux platform and second on windows only to dreamweaver.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.windows.iis.php should answer all questions regarding the installation of PHP with IIS.