Review - NuSphere's PHPEd

PHPEd has built-in support for connecting to, viewing and querying MySQL databases. The MySQL tab provides one click login access to databases. Once connected, you use a tree view structure to navigate through databases, tables and users:

To display the schema for a database or table, you simply click on it, and it'll appear in the main window. There are five buttons that give us information about the currently selected MySQL table: Summary, structure, data, privileges and SQL, which allows you to query the database and view that queries results right there in PHPEd's main window:

This is a great timesaving feature and works in the same way as Microsoft SQL Server's Query Analyzer tool. It saves you from having to use the MySQL console application or phpMyAdmin to manipulate your databases all the time.

Although the built-in MySQL support is great, PHPEd does lack support for the several other popular databases that PHP supports including MS SQL Server, Oracle and PostgreSQL. This is a shame really, as PHPEd supports MySQL so well.

Easy JavaScript Creation

As mentioned earlier, you can easily create JavaScripts with PHPEd. If you don't have much experience with JavaScript, then PHPEd's "JS" tab might be just the thing for you. It contains a tree view list of every JavaScript function. To add the code for any of these JavaScript functions to your code, you simply double-click on the one you want and PHPEd takes care of the rest:

The last (and most important) feature that I want to talk about is PHPEd's built-in debugging support. If you're working with a variable and want to see its current value at any point in your code, you simply highlight it, and PHPEd will show a tool tip with its current value, like this:

Another debugging feature of PHPEd is its code debug-and-display feature. We can pass a snippet of our code to the debugger, which displays the results in PHPEd's built in browser window. To do this, we simply select the piece of code that we want to debug and then click on the Run -> Run In Debugger menu item, or press the F5 function key.

Just like in Visual Basic, we can also set break points, run code up to a certain line, step over, into and out of code, and add variable watch points to our code. All of these options are accessible from the Run menu (pictured at right).

When you've created your site and are ready to upload it, PHPEd comes to the rescue with its built-in FTP manager. It's literally a two-click process to connect to your Web server via FTP: one click to edit your account details, and another to actually connect to your server.

You can also use PHPEd's built-in FTP manager to open remote files locally. This is a great time saver if you're constantly changing files on your remote Web server.