Whenever we want to write a large application, large website or software we use an IDE or an Editor program for doing this job. Technically it is possible to write the whole website or a complete software into notepad file but practically it is almost impossible and time-consuming because and it’s quite hectic. So we need a complete set of environment, programs for doing this job and the answer is IDE. One, in particular, we are going to discuss today is PHPStorm:
- What is an IDE?
- What is PhpStorm?
- An overview of modules in PhpStorm
- Creating a simple PHP application in PhpStorm
What is an IDE?
Now we understand the problem with writing large web application with a text editor. Let’s take the next move, the IDE stands for integrated development environment this is a complete package of software provide various type of tools for writing, testing and debugging our application and many more. The IDE is designed to simplifying the code and minify the programming bugs. This combined tools collections are created to smooth the software development process and can recognize and decrease coding mistakes and typos.
There are also some IDE’s are open source and some are commercial this means you need to pay to use that IDE. Let’s take some example of ideals that are available in market some of them are quite popular for example, Xcode is an IDE to develop the Mac OS and IOS platform applications whether it is mobile application, desktop application or Apple watch application another example is Android studio the Android studio is used for developing Android applications these two are very popular IDE.
What is PhpStorm?
Let’s talk about the PhpStorm, well PhpStorm is an IDE that is designed to handle big PHP projects it supports all the type of PHP related tools also debugging and testing tools. So this it is specially designed for PHP language, the developers who want to make web apps and PHP related projects they really like to work with PHP storm. PhpStorm is a monetary, portable platform IDE for PHP, built by the Czech Republic-based company JetBrains.
An overview of modules in PhpStorm
- Intelligent Coding Assistance
When we write code this provides an autocomplete feature by which whenever we type or write any function, class, variable, etc. it autocompletes and gives us a nice drop-down list of all related models. Let’s take a simple example is_array() is a function that checks whether the given value or given data is an array or not. So when we write this function is_array() in PhpStorm it shows what parameter you need to pass in this function also you can observe the definition of this function in the library.
- Smart Code Navigation
Let’s first discuss the problem navigate from one code block to another code block and for one code file to another code file. We need to switch to the multiple files in text editor and we need to find out in which file we write the actual code that we want to use in another class or another file but this problem is not happening in the case of PhpStorm because it gives us a nice search tool where we find out what particular code be right in what particular file.
Also to switch between multiple files when we click on the keyboard shift key double times it opens a panel where it shows all the modules open and recently open files.
- Fast and Safe Refactoring
Fast and safe refactoring whenever we want to reset our code, for example in some cases we need an inline variable, rename, transfer, remove, extract method, push members to code up and pull members code down, change function signature and many other changes.
The PhpStorm gives us a very fine way to reflect our code. It also shows us whenever we want to refactor our code, it gives us information about, in which file that code will be reflected or what changes are made.
- Easy Debugging and Testing
Now let’s talk about debugging and testing, well I think that text editor is a very hard way to test and debug our or in most cases, it doesn’t for this type of functionality but PhpStorm gives us a very nice debugging and testing tools.
PhpStorm has a visual debugger that needs no configuration and provides excellent functionality, this will track what things happening on each step that uses x debug and send to the debugger and we want the unit testing it gives us PHP unit and BDD.
- Built-in developer and frontend tools
PhpStorm gives us built-in developer tools for handling the application to track source code change, integration, SQL query and database handle, remote deployment, terminal commands tools, Docker, Composer, API Client, and some other tools and frontend tools like such as HTML.
For styling Sass, CSS, Stylus, and Less. For scripting Coffee Script, JavaScript, Emmet, and Typescript with refactoring, debugging, and unit testing.
Creating a simple PHP application in PhpStorm
Now let’s create a simple HTML form and the form is handled by our PHP code. We need to create two files one is the submit.php file, that file is responsible for form handling and another one is normal HTML form file index.html. The form contains three fields first, last, email and one submit button when a user clicks on submit button the form submitted on the submit.php and the submit.php file executes the code. Finally, it prints all three form fields value.
index.html
<html> <head> <title>Register User</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> </head> <body> <h2>Register User:</h2> <!-- we created a form with method post and action is our php file(submit.php) --> <form action="submit.php" method="POST"> <!-- each field we pass the name property because our PHP code grab the filed value with the 'name' of the field --> User First name: <input type="text" name="first"> <br> User Last name: <input type="text" name="last"> <br> Email id: <input type="email" name="email"> <br> <input type="submit" name="form_submit" value="Submit"> </form> </body> </html>
submit.php
<?php
if(isset($_POST['form_submit'])){
// get values from form
$first = $_POST['first'];
$last = $_POST['last'];
$email = $_POST['email'];
// print all three value when user clicks on submit
echo $first;
echo $last;
echo $email;
}
?>
With this, we come to an end of this PhpStprm article. I hope you got an idea of the IDE and hope you will start coding ASAP.
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