PHP IDE users - LimeSurvey Project Lead Carsten Schmitz

Testimonial by Carsten Schmitz / LimeSurvey Project Lead:

"LimeSurvey is a very successful free open source software written in PHP, with over 220,000 downloads since it started in 2003. The project has more than 9,000 downloads every month and about 35,000 unique visitors every month. We started to use PhpED a couple years since the source code of LimeSurvey 1.x is written in a procedural manner and the usual Programmers editor didn't cut the cheese anymore. The very low learning curve and the availability of the software on Windows _and_ Linux were the real hook-up for us to use PhpED.

For work on LimeSurvey 1.x we especially appreciated the easy way to handle debug and code insight features (variable inspection during runtime, etc) - especially in open source projects this is a must to understand code which was written by other contributors to the project and which may not be commented very well. Included DB management tools, variable watches, breakpoints, code completion features made PhpED the daily work tool for the LimeSurvey core developers. The future of LimeSurvey is the currently developed version 2, a complete rewrite based on CakePHP (a PHP application framework). In this new environment PhpED proved to be very valuable. Because an object-oriented model is used in this framework the debugging of single methods/properties and the object mode insight got more important as ever before. PhpED does master this with flying colors. We are using Firefox in connection with PhpED and with using the Firefox debug bar plug installed it is possible to start debugging at any point in the web application. Even if you are just occasionally clicking through the web-application and something catches your attention, you can activate the debug mode from the Firefox tool bar (PhpED has to run somewhere in the background) and start debugging right from the page you are loading next or just by reloading the current one.

PhpED has sped up our work speed by at least 50% - especially if the code is a little more complex working with PhpED is a big reward for the person coding PHP as it speeds up debugging and makes it actually fun. No PHP coder should work without a great tool like that."

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Best regards from Hamburg/Germany

Carsten Schmitz

LimeSurvey Project Leader
carsten.schmitz@limesurvey.org

http://www.limesurvey.org

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