Though precise statistics are difficult to obtain, PHP is undeniably a top choice as a Website building language. Since October 2009, the TIOBE Programming Community Index has PHP holding third place — behind Java and C — among programming languages overall. Regardless of the exact extent of PHP’s usage, you need only consider that Web sites such as Facebook — which manages millions of users and petabytes of content — use PHP; workloads of that magnitude demand a serious programming language and supporting environment.
You can’t build a world-class Website without a good development environment. In the case of PHP, the development environment must be particularly capable; a PHP programmer will rarely be programming only in PHP. PHP is necessarily entwined with HTML and JavaScripton the front end and with SQL on the back end. Consequently, a good PHP IDE must allow the developer to work with equal ease in multiple languages (both programming …