Perfect Christmas gift for a PHP programmer

Pam1234

Hi. I'm a newbie when it comes to PHP, having used others' scripts but never having written my own. I'm a web designer.

I work extensively as a subcontractor for the world's nicest guy who is a PHP programmer. (I know what you're thinking - no crush here, he's married, I'm married, strictly platonic. We don't even work in the same office.)

Basically I help come up with ideas and a framework for his web hosting service that includes a templated easy-to-use back-end. He then comes up with the PHP to make it work (that's extremely simplified but it's too hard to explain so you'll have to trust me on this). Right now there is a backlog of work for him to do because it's a lot faster for me to code in HTML than it is for him to work everything out program-wise in PHP. I would like to give him a Christmas gift that he can really use.

He has been a PHP programmer since at least 1996, but my sense is that he is "old school" and isn't familiar with all the great tools out there that are available to him. (For example, I introduced him to CSS recently... he was oblivious to it.) He does not have a PHP editor and does everything the hard way. I don't know, maybe it's not the hard way for him...but I really enjoy my tools (not WYSIWYG, but things that help make life easier, like syntax colors, validators, etc. I enjoy HTML-Edit by Chami).

I considered purchasing a professional PHP editor as a gift. I thought about Maguma Studio Desktop because he doesn't have PHP or MySQL installed on his machine, and must upload everything to the server to test. When I asked why, he said it's too much trouble otherwise. Since this program has everything integrated I figured it would be easy...? Would that be something a PHP programmer would really appreciate? Do PHP programmers care if PHP is installed on their computers?

The other idea was to purchase either EditPlus or UltraEdit (much cheaper). But frankly, HTML-Edit might do just as well. This guy doesn't like to spend money so he might not purchase anything on his own.

OK, so pretend you are a PHP programmer and are about to receive a gift from me and you you are struggling along in the dinosaur age. What would make you smile? What would make you say, "Oh no, I'll never use this... but I'll pretend to like it..."

Are my ideas all washed up? Maybe I should just buy him a paperweight. :-)

Thanks for your ideas and suggestions!

Pam

dp777

I use Zend Studio and its been great and I love it, and a lot of hte other php programmers I work with do too. However, we have a few "old-school" programmers around that absolutely refuse to touch it and still pull everything up in either vi or pico. So you might want to look into whether are not he'd like a gift like that. If you are out of ideas, thinkgeek.com has everything any computer nerd would love. Just look around there, good luck!

stolzyboy

i don't use wysiwyg's and i don't generally use IDE's i just go for a good text editor with syntax highlighting - that's it

HomeSite is my preference... Used to be made by Allaire, but Macromedia bought it and put their name on it.

So you are looking for a christmas present for this fella, how 'bout HomeSite and a pocket protector. 😃 That's what I want...

Pam1234

Thanks for the replies so far! It looks like this is a matter of preference...which makes it kinda tough. This guy is actually extremely intelligent and a great programmer. He's just too busy to pay attention to progress. :-)

He doesn't even have an HTML editor installed on his computer (except FrontPage, which is basically useless). He certainly doesn't have PHP, a server, basically zilch - but wouldn't the latter make his job easier? Since I don't program it's hard for me to know but I did recently install a PHP forum and I could never test anything without FTP'ing up to the server and trying it live - kinda scary when you have members on there and the site could go down due to a missed quotation mark or whatever. (I was adding a lot of mods so it got kinda hairy sometimes.)

And wouldn't it be easier if he could work in an environment where everything was at his fingertips? That is one thing that appeals to me about the IDE alternative. I haven't talked myself into anything, I'm very open, just trying to understand how to make his life easier. I know that I, personally, hate using programs like Dreamweaver so I understand why I should steer away from WYSIWYG. Thanks again everyone!

Pam

stolzyboy

You don't need an IDE environment to run PHP on your own computer. All you need to do is download Apache and PHP and you can run PHP scripts off your local computer, then once they work, you can ftp them to the hosted server. Also, if you want database interaction, you can download MySQL too.

AstroTeg

thinkgeek.com definitely has some good stuff.

As for the editor/IDE, I don't know. I was thinking about it for a moment and something like an editor or IDE might need to be introduced gently - especially if one is stuck in their ways. You kind of get comfy with a particular tool and you continue to use it because its comfy and you know all its tricks. But if a new tool is introduced gently like, "Dude! Check out this editor! You could do PHP and HTML from it! It even has macros and and custom syntax highlighting!" If there's interest, then install and go from there...

Sounds goofy, but its like picking out a pet. There's a lot of pets out there and each one is different in its unique way. Finding one that works with a person can be tough.

I'm not sure what you're price range is or what hardware you have laying around, but what might be interesting (and yet truely needed) is an Apache + PHP + MySQL computer. It could be rather low end since it would be for development purposes. Have all the software loaded up and ready to go. Just an idea. There's some logistics issues like finding a computer. Getting everything loaded and working. Then getting it to work in his network (assuming he has one).

Hmm... I think thats all the ideas I have.

parawizard

i use PHP expert editor its great works awesome! flawless you can try it out too just google it!

hasent bugged up on me yet (any other editor has that i have tried) its a good prog fairly cheap too 🙂

Weedpacket

Let's not start another "what's your favourite editor?" thread, please. Try and be a bit original; like clothes 🙂

Or maybe a really comfy chair. Now that would be useful, or a subscription to a suitable magazine so that he can keep up (catch up?) with current practices.