TextMate for PHP development

If you want to improve your productivity and programming skills in general, getting to know better the tools you use every day is one of  the important things to invest your time in. Keyboard shortcuts of your favorite editor are especially important and using them in your daily routine will save you lot of hand movements towards mouse, lot of context switching and will help you focus on what is important.

I use TextMate for everyday PHP development and I find it excellent. There are some features that more complex IDEs provide out of the box, but after you get used to work with TextMate and learn how to be productive you can hardly find better option. Keyboard shortcuts are one of its good parts and key to boosting your productivity.

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PHP debugging with FirePHP

I really like when I stumble upon a creative and useful piece of software that could improve my everyday development process. I remember when I started using FireBug it was great help in the HTML/CSS/JavaScript development and debugging.

I’ve just found out FirePHP, FireBug plugin that enables the developer to send log messages from PHP code to FireBug console. Quite helpfull I can say It consists of Firefox extension (mentioned FireBug plugin) and small PHP logger that you actually use in your code to communicate with the FireBug console. Logger comes in procedural and object-oriented fashion so if you are striving towards exceptional performance of your PHP app, or just still old-school PHP4 (R.I.P.), then man you have your choice Otherwise use OO PHP5 logger class. I’ve manage to set the demo, that goes within the PHP library, in a couple of minutes and I’m looking forward for using it in the future.

Thanks guys for great work.
Official FirePHP website

Another cool thing that comes with the FirePHP is its integration posibilities with CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, Kohana, PRADO, Symfony, TYPO3, Zend Framework. So there is some for anyone.