PHP development

The one thing that keeps me busy with my MacBook is PHP development. Before I bought it, I guessed that XCode (Apple's own IDE) is a great thing and that many open-source items are pre-installed on Leopard... But after some time I gave it a try and configured my machine for local PHP-MySql development. MySql was missing, but Apache was also conviniently preinstalled, so I had my MAMP workstation ready in less than a day. Before that, I even tried RoR, but decided to stick to my own PHP framework.

I was so eager to test how PHP development looks like that I even started re-design of the framework, throwing out the only part that wasn't programmed by me (and it was an MVC framework knows as Fusebox). Before, I had my development on hosting server. Now, I have ultra-fast development environment with all the components running on my own machine. I even started to think about such things as performance (oddly enough, my own MacBook executes my scripts much faster than my hosting server does).

XCode is great tool, especially for its price tag, which is, as you know, zero. IT may be lacking some features of Eclipse and Visual Studio, but I would not use those features anyway, they are too difficult for me. There are no intellisense, breakpoint debugging and refactoring for PHP, but ultra-responsive IDE with code folding and syntax coloring covers all my needs. The one thing that bugs me a bit is that I did not find a way to have Tabbed interface for open documents, the way like Eclipse and Visual Studio are doing, but I used to this. I am now much more creative than on Windows before.