jensen Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

I have been using Eclipse PDT for my PHP development on Windows. (And on Linux too, I use Vim for quick and small changes but for the entire project I prefer a complete IDE package.) Apart from missing a decent auto-format feature I quite like it.

Unfortunately Eclipse still suffers from the same problems I encountered when I used it for Java development at school. It's bloated and requires a lot of memory slowing down my computers.

At the end of 2008 NetBeans 6.5 has been release with what seemed to be decent PHP support. Last week I made the change. The only thing I was missing was the ability to define a variable type within a comment.

Example:

In Eclipse this would allow me to use code completion on the $player variable which would come in handy when the object has a few dozen functions and properties. It seems I wasn't the only one missing this and it has been introduced into the next NetBeans version.

If you are looking for an easy cross-platform PHP IDE I can only advise you to give it a try!