Although I mostly blog about .NET and related technologies, tools, etc., this time I’m writing about PHP. I work a lot with PHP as well. And recently I got a small project to do and I was looking for a free but cute PHP IDE. I’m quite aware about Eclipse and PHP Development Tools for Eclipse, but I still was wondering if there is some other free tool for PHP. Eventually, I remembered NetBeans.

NetBeans is mostly known for Java developers as a good and free IDE. At the same time recently NetBeans started supporting other languages, like C/C++, Ruby and finally PHP. Moreover it not only supports plain PHP, but it offers quite good support of HTML and JavaScript. More...

I've been programming with PHP for many years and have used a lot of editors and so-called IDEs, I must admit that PHP IDEs have become much better now and they differ significantly from simple editors with syntax highlighting. Anyway, in the recent time I have been working much with Visual Studio. I must confess that I really love it, some people may argue of course, especially Java developers who are fond of their development tools and tend to look down at other ones. So, I was happy to learn that there is a plug-in that enables you to program with PHP in a familiar development environment of Visual Studio. Sure, I doubt that it will interest people who don't have Visual Studio, but for developer who are used to it, it's a great choice, I think. More...

This story is not a debate on "ASP.NET vs PHP", but this story is about the people who develop their web applications with PHP, but pretend that they are using ASP.NET. Yes, such people do really exist. I came across their posts in the forums, where they said that or asked how to change the extension of PHP scripts to .aspx.

Why on Earth are they doing that? More...

I read about the PHP Implementation of LINQ called PHPLinq. Frankly, I was sceptical about it. Finally, I gave it a try. I still remain sceptical...

Let’s me explain why. Take a look at this fairly simple example More...

Have you ever faced a situation when you need to manipulate Excel spreadsheets with PHP on the server that is running Linux? If you had a Windows Server you could use PHP COM extensions. However they are unavailable on Linux.

Hopefully, there is a solution. It is called Open XML. It’s a new format of Microsoft Office documents introduced in Microsoft Office 2007. Basically, an Open XML file is a ZIP archive that contains XML files that represent the document mark-up. You can view it yourself or read some documentation, my article isn’t about Open XML, but about the PHP library for working with Excel 2007 files. It also supports Excel 97 format by incor porating a PEAR library.

The library is called PHPExcel. It allows you to read/write Excel spreadsheets, save them in many formats including PDF and HTML. It supports formulas,styles and etc. More...