PHPStorm 5 Released

At Edmonds Commerce we were staunch Netbeans users for years but we always struggled with large scale projects (Magento I’m looking at you) meaning that Netbeans would sometimes really crawl as it tried to reindex thousands of PHP files.

After a recent upgrade of our Linux desktop environment to the Mate edition of Linux Mint 13, Netbeans seemed to perform even worse and had a few bugs as well. At the same time we had been evaluating other IDE options including Eclipse and Zend Studio (which we all have free licences for thanks to being Zend Certified Developers).

In the end though, the one we tried that really impressed was PHPStorm. It isn’t free open source but it isn’t too expensive, especially considering it is perhaps the single most important and highly used tool of a professional PHP developer.

Now a new version has come out. Downloading and upgrading took all of 5 minutes and we are now going to enjoy better performance and some nice new features. I have yet to really test out the new version so I can’t really report on them but they look good. You can read about all the new features in version 5 here.