Over the past few years, there has been a tremendous shift from "fat client" applications to Web-based applications. And with that shift, there have been a number of tools created to help developers create Web-based applications and Web pages. If you were to ask a developer what his or her tool of choice was, the answer would vary widely, depending on the platform and the developer's background.
In this road test for Web tools, we are going to look at a selection of tools that you can use to develop Web applications. Some of the tools are specific for a platform or language and some can be used across multiple platforms or languages. In addition, we will be looking at free software you can download, as well as a mix of low-cost and commercial Web development applications.
As with any software review, we haven't covered every single Web development tool on the market. We selected the tools for this round-up to cover a wide range of platforms and languages, functionality and features.
| Ease of use | To start, we evaluated how easy each tool was to learn and use, including an evaluation of the design environment itself, placement of commonly used items, etc. and the general overall impression of the tool. |
| Features and functionality | Covering features included within the design environment for reducing development time and manual coding of common tasks, features that are included or not present, etc. |
| User Interface Development | Most Web applications have some sort of user interface and this set of criteria was used to evaluate how well the tool could be used to create full-featured HTML pages and develop highly formatted Web applications. |
| Code development | Behind the scenes, Web applications feature code (and usually lots of it.) With this set of criteria, we are judging how well the tool is suited to coding, including debugging features, step-throughs, etc. |
| Platform and language support | Most of the tools we reviewed support multiple platforms and languages and in this set of criteria, we look at how well this support is developed. |
| Documentation and support | And finally, we have evaluated the documentation and support that is available for each tool. We look at whether the documentation organised and well written and also look at the support and user communities around each. |
Table 1: Evaluation criteria
Zend Studio 3.5.1
http://www.zend.com
Zend Studio is well known among PHP developers and is the development tool of choice for a large chunk of the professional PHP community. Zend Studio has grown over the past few releases to become a fully-fledged Web development tool in it's own right. Zend only supports PHP development, but there is a theory that you can do many, many things good or one thing very well and Zend Studio takes that concept to heart. You won't find support for any other languages here, but it does do PHP development extremely well.
For PHP developers, the main competitor to Zend Studio would have to be notepad. And while it is certainly an easy environment to learn, Zend Studio provides a number of features that will save you time in the long run. As a relative "newbie" PHP developer, I found the user interface easy to navigate and I was creating new projects and pages within a few minutes.
Figure 1: Zend Studio
For features, Zend Studio has notepad beat with both internal and remote debuggers that make trapping errors and finding problems a painless process. And you will also appreciate the code completion features and syntax highlighting that works for PHP, HTML and JavaScript code and makes it easier to see where you are at in the code. And for teams, the CVS integration means that you won't be searching for where you put that snippet of code you needed.
There is one area where Zend Studio is a bit of a let-down and that is when you are developing the user interface. It is cumbersome to create a highly-formatted Web page and the tool lacks a WYSIWYG editor, which means that you need to know a bit about HTML as well as PHP.
The good news is that Zend Studio is one of the few true cross-platform products, with versions available on Windows, Mac and most major Linux distributions and supports PHP 5 and previous versions. In fact, the documentation is well-written and includes the PHP 5 manual, so you don't have very far to look when you need help. In addition, Zend Studio has a strong user community and there are a number of tutorials around to help you get started.
For PHP developers who are serious about their development, this tool is topsâ€"for creating formatted PHP pages, you may need to look into another Web development tool for the actual design work.
Do you need help with HTML? 
1
Some Guy - 28/10/04
What about WebLogic Workshop and IntelliJ for JSP/HTML development
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2
Ken Baum - 28/10/04
Check out www.codecharge.com ---
It can code in ASP, .net, PHP . JSP & Cold Fusion all in one program.
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3
Damien - 28/10/04
For CFMX, PHP (XHTML+CSS output) use EditPlus, using DirectoryOpus as my site manager and SVN/TortoiseSVN for revision management. Works pretty well, though I'm really starting to see some limitations in EditPlus.. if only they'd add more features, it has been pretty static for the past few years.
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4
Aram Yegenian - 28/10/04
I recently got acquainted with Eclipse and the PHP plugin, they are an extremely powerful combination.
It's a multi-platform, open source development environment by IBM. Although it's primarily based for Java development, it's plugin based so you can find plugins for just about any language (C,C++,PHP,PERL,Java,C#,...)
Advantages: syntax highligting, code completion, cvs integration, sql integration, team synchronization, debugger, ...
Have a look at it...
Eclipse: http://www.eclipse.org/
PHPEclipse: http://www.phpeclipse.de/
More plugins: http://www.eclipse-plugins.info/
PHPBuilder Article: http://phpbuilder.com/columns/chow20040921.php3
/dev/aram
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5
Samir - 29/10/04
I would like to present, that there are more tools that these four.
For PHP, I like PHP Edit, which is better than Notepad and even than Zend Studio. It's not cross platform. It's for Windows only. For personal use is free *(when you register at http://www.waterproof.fr/)
Also worth mentioning is Sun Studio Creator for JSF *(Java Server Faces, a Sun's answer to Asp.Net 1.1).
It's cross platform and 30 day trial.
Exadel *(www.exadel.com) has presented, two payable Eclipse plug-ins, caled StrutsStudio and JSFStudio.
And yes, JSF Editors are like WebMAtrix or VS.Net 2003. Drag and drop objects, changeing Properties and so on and so forth.
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6
Nick Hudson - 29/10/04
Right-on! Nothing beats Zend Studio & PHP!
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7
David Boccabella - 15/02/05
Definately have a look at CodeCharge
This IDE will let you do Java, ASP, .Net, ColdFusion, and PHP.
Its very fast to use and takes care of a lot of the slog work (Search, List, Add, Mod, Delete) leaving you to put in the smarts.
The output code is clean and does not require any special libraries on the seerver. In fact - you can take a finished app and then modify it outside of the codecharge environment.
We have been using it for over a year now and with several very large projects under our belt I can recommend it as a very powerful tool.
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8
SoniX - 10/07/05
There is no tool that can compare to PHPED when it comes to PHP programming.
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