A newbie “Smoking Yoda” asked a question on the PHPR support forum aslking what everyone thought about PHPR and whether he should invest in the software. It’s a legitimate question in my opinion considering that there are a whole lot of IDE’s out there that are open sourced, AKA “free for the taking”. Here is an excerpt from his post.
Quoting SmokingYoda: I’m a reasonably new web designer, mainly html but have also used a few open source cms’s (and like!). But I’m looking to develop php/mysql dynamic sites now for myself and my clients. I have little to no knowlage of php (can read/hack it a bit but no write) and PHPRunner seems to be v’interesting as it could solve my noobieness!
I found out about PHPRunner when researching another software that looked interesting….now dont spit at me! EasyGen was its name and it had very mixed reviews when I went hunting, although the “magazine” reviews said it rocked, I looked a lil deeper.
So…the question is, is PHPRunner the answer?!!I pick things up quick and moving into dynamic sites is my next move, to enable me to move my business on to the next level and as always money is an issue (lack of it) so I don’t want to make a mistake when purchasing software….so convince me!!
I quickly responded to his thread with my opinion of PHPRunner as did a few other members of the community, all with positive things to say about the software. I think that a big misconception people have when looking at PHPR is that they immediately compare it to other IDE’s that are out there like Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc. Granted, PHPR can be used very similarly by operating in code view inside the Visual Editor, but for me the biggest selling point for the software is that it is also a code generator! That’s right, you basically work your way through the super intuitive interface by first setting up your database information and table structures and then march right on through the process of generating pages for add / edit / view / list / and search and before you know it you are ready to style your application inside the visual editor.
Once you have everything looking just the way you want inside the visual editor you can then FTP your site files to your website. That’s right, it also has a built in FTP utility that is pretty advanced from what I have seen, it will handle setting all of your file permissions for you and everything. It’s not hard to become spoiled with software like this on the market!
I think that another reason a lot of the people in the PHPR community are so passionate about the product is because the level of support from Xline is second to none. I have sent support emails with issues before and had a response in my inbox before I could run and grab a sandwich. Sergey, Alexey, and the rest of the crew are awesome! The message board is also a pretty quick way to find answers to support issues, the PHPR community rocks!
If you are looking for ways to speed up your development process I recommend giving PHPR a try, you can click here for more information and to download a free trial of the software. I think that you will like what you see, everyone I have shown this software to has appreciated what it does, even old school developers who are even more hardheaded than I am…
Questions or Comments?