In my many years of programming, almost 20 years now, I have used countless integrated development environments (IDEs). I have used everything from a simple text editor all the way up to the high-end IDEs that Sybase, IBM, and Oracle use. More recently I have come to embrace the open source movement and development in Web environments. My programming language of choice for these days is PHP, so it stands to reason that I would be looking for an IDE. Like so many other developers I followed the path of looking for the pinnacle of IDEs for PHP. I started with basic text editors, moved into text editors with code colorizations, and then into project-based development environments, and finally to a fully robust IDE. The one that I've been using for a few years now is Zend's Studio Professional.

Zend decided to join in with the Eclipse community that was founded by IBM a number of years ago, and I think it's a great idea. The benefit of joining with the Eclipse community is many and varied. Since Eclipse was primarily established as a Java development environment it has grown by leaps and bounds in add-on libraries, which is just one popular area.