I’ve been using phpDesigner6 for over a year now and it’s become by far my favourite web development environment. Less bloated and more fleet-footed than Zend Studio, more robust (for me at least) than PhpEd and cheaper than both, phpDesigner is just as comfortable editing HTML and CSS as PHP and is reassuringly devoid of a drag and drop GUI.

Developer MPSoftware has now released phpDesigner7 which adds intelligent JavaScript editing to the mix. Not only do you get the obligatory syntax highlighting and code completion but this extends also to a range of the most popular JavaScript frameworks/libraries. These include jQuery, Dojo and Prototype but not, at present, the BBC’s Glow library. The net result of this is that code suggestion works not just for native JavaScript commands and functions but also the custom classes included in these frameworks: and it achieves this “out of the box” with no additional configuration.

Whilst JavaScript support is the major news in this release, there’s also a raft of smaller but nevertheless welcome changes. There’s a CSS code explorer and the facility to jump directly to a CSS declaration. phpDesigner now intelligently suggests the correct closing tag in HTML and you can edit the default file templates so that, for example, you can include standard information at the start of all your PHP classes.

phpDesigner7 continues to be responsive in use and enjoys the rare knack of staying out of the way and allowing me to code whilst having all the necessary power a click or two away. A full commercial licence can be had for £89.50 + VAT which includes permission to install on 3 of your PCs. This represents excellent value for such a complete development environment and the upgrade price of £50 + VAT makes this a worthwhile update for existing users, especially if you use JavaScript alongside PHP.