Sick of Zend Studio and Eclipse? Do you think “Zend Studio for IBM i” sucks? I was sick of it and found the Netbeans IDE and found its a great alternative to the Clunky Zend Studio mess.
What can Netbeans do? Everything all in one!
PHP IDE – Code Highlighting, Auto completing etc…
IBMi DB2 Database access via the JTOpen
Source Control via SVN or GIT
FTP your files to the I5 after saving the file locally
to name a few features i was looking for in the Zend Studio for i, here’s what else it can do.
Get Started
Download Netbeans
Here’s the download link for Netbeans IDE.
SVN Setup
Learn how to setup subversion in Netbeans from their online tutorial.
Connecting to the AS400 / I5 / IBMi to run SQL from the IDE
To set up the database connection to the I5 you’ll need to download JTOPEN then go to the services tab (click ctrl+5 when in Netbeans), right click drivers, and click new drivers, click add and find the jt400.jar file from the JTOPEN download folder
After the driver is set up, right click it and click “connect using”, set the driver to JTOpen400 fill in the username and password and set the url to jdbc:as400://as400servername/libraryname
Auto-FTP of files
Go over the tutorial on netbeans.org to setup a remote project so that your files are automatically FTP’d to your I5.
Alternative to System i Navigator
Why not use the System I Navigator? Well I find it annoying the number of things I have to click before I can finally run a sql query. Also I like having 1 application to do everything. There are some times where I run a script in System i Navigator’s “Run SQL” window because it supports CL commands via “CL: <CL Command here>”
Though I am new to PHP, I have to agree with you, I like NetBeans better than Zend Studio. The Style Builder for CSS is nice and something I don’t see in Zend Studio. I was able to load Zend Framework and get it going in NetBeans also.
Just a lot of things to like about NetBeans.
One question. I don’t use debug with either client …. yet. Have you been able to get xdebug to work with Zend Server?
Thx for the tip on NetBeans!
Jay
I’m actually not running zend server, just running Red Hat Linux and PHP 5.3. I recently tried to get xdebug to work but had troubles getting the right php-devel version. The systems admin before had custom compiled PHP and left out the extensions due to secruity and performance reasons. Unfortunately I’m not a guru when it comes to RPMs, linux repos and yum etc… So I think i compiled xdebug in 5.1.6 and therefore won’t work when running PHP 5.3.
I was able to get xdebug to work locally on my windows machine running Xampp and using netbeans xdebug client. Having xdebug running will save a lot of time in development, unfortunately I’ll only be able to use it when developing locally on the windows box.
Also you might want to put the Zend Framework in the PHP include path of the project. This will allow you to have multiple projects use the same zend framework folder.
Good post. I’ve tried and it works. Thank you