At long last, the 6.5 version of NetBeans is due to arrive in 10 days time. It’s been a long 7 months since the last major release of the IDE and application platform. This one, like so many others before it, is worth the wait.
One of the more anticipated features for NetBeans 6.5 is the native PHP support. This will mark the first version that embraces the ever popular interpreted scripting language. It appears that PHP 5+ will be required and that it will support code completion/highlighting, debugging (via xdebug), stubbing out database code and more.
In a recent blog post to the community, the PHP for Netbeans Team wondered aloud what PHP framework support developers wold like to see made available within Netbeans. The question set off something of a firestorm on the NetBeans blogging site resulting in the most highly voted upon issue in NetBeans history. While the voting is still open until the release of 6.5, Symfony , with its 400+ votes, appears to be a shoe-in for eventual support in the IDE. This is great news as Symfony is the most Rails-like framework I’ve ever used for PHP.
Sadly, do not expect to see the arrival of Symfony support very soon. It likely will not make an appearance until the next release. As a consilation, Prado has early support in NetBeans as the Team begins to investigate fleshing out a way to add framework support in a modular manner.