Essential LAMP tools

For the last time am I going to utter the words ‘I wish I’d found this earlier’. There are so many great tools out there for developers that it can become overwhelming. I used to just accept the flaws in my text editor or database client. Often telling myself ‘it’s better the devil you know’. Recently, however, certain frustrations have caused me to reassess the tools I am using. At this current point in time, I have reached a state of LAMP developer nirvana! This article is to help you reach the same higher state of consciousness!

OK, few points to know before we kick off. I am very tight with my cash. Despite this, I am a keen Apple advocate (maybe the two traits aren’t entirely unrelated). The tools I’ll talk about will be for OSx but I’ll try to mention some Windows tools along the way.

MySQL
Free GUIs for MySQL have come a long way since the free ones provided by MySQL. The latest incarnation is Workbench. The killer functionality here is the ERR modelling creation tool. You create your database, tables, initial inserts and relationships. Hit forward engineer and hey presto! Your schema is all up and running. And you also have a fully documented schema. As a habit, I try to add comments to all tables and some columns. This diagram process is one of my first tasks for any new project. The query editor for Workbench doesn’t include a decent auto-complete functionality. An essential feature if you ask me. For this try Sequel Pro. It’s snappy, free and highly intuitive.

Text editor
OK, the most delicate of subjects. I’ve never really used a full IDE to develop but I hear Eclipse is the front-runner on this. I had been recently using Komodo edit which is a great free text editor. My highlight feature on this is the scanning of other PHP DocBlock comments. Within your current file, it sees you’re calling a method from another class (in another file) and tells you what parameters the class expects. Pure black magic. My only gripe with the editor was that the shortcuts weren’t intuitive and some just didn’t work. I’d found Textmate was better for this so gave Textmate 2 a try. They’ve really dropped the ball on this. Textmate 2 is awful! That’s when I found Sublime Text. Sublime Text will cost you around £45 but it’s worth every penny. Once package control is installed you have a world of useful plugins at your fingertips! For Windows, I always find Notepad++ a decent free editor.

Source control
I’ve used CVS and Subversion. Both of which are quite similar. Recently, I’ve made the switch to GIT and I am amazed by it! I’ve implemented a GIT flow approach which means I have a solid workflow which doesn’t interfere with other feature branches on the same code base. Switching to different features is so easy and still makes me go ‘wow’ when I do it.

Linux/Apache
I work on the mac mainly as it’s a UNIX-based operating system. This allows me to use a lot of the Pre-built commands available with my personal/work Linux servers. The terminal app is very good on the Mac and likewise Putty on Windows is also very good. For package installation on the Mac Macports is essential and for Linux Yum is superb!

I guess that’s it for the time being! To take the pain out of setting up your LAMP environment on your mac I would highly recommend Zend’s community server.

Next time I’ll discuss my project process methodology.