CodeLobster PHP Edition Editor's Review

Create cool web sites and apps with this free portable IDE for Windows.

There's a huge movement from the White House to get the children of the country to learn to program. The thought and idea behind this is that if they start at a young age, they'll get very good at it, and perhaps have jobs available to them to help them through paying for a college education and/or to continue to support them after they get out of college. The earlier they start, the better they will be.

Unfortunately, development tools can be expensive; and there are a lot of languages to pick from. Some of the easiest and most valuable languages are web-based; which is why I like things like Codelobster PHP Edition. It's a free, easy to use PHP development environment for Windows and I think you're going to like it.

Most IDE's are expensive. You can pay up to $500 USD for a single seat license for some tools, and even more for others. Codelobster PHP Edition is free and it can auto highlight PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with autocomplete. It also has a powerful, built-in PHP debugger, a code validator, and a SQL manager. Help is also very near. If you get stuck, you can always tap F1 and get the help you need. The internal debugger also automatically senses your server settings and configures the files you need so you can use the debugger. This is totally awesome on a free tool.

App Pro's: Free, built in help, built in debugger, supports nearly a dozen different plug-ins

App Con's: for coders only

Conclusion: Coding and integrated development environments that support a number of languages – HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP – are usually very expensive. Finding one that's free, let alone with code and pair highlighting, autocomplete as well as context and dynamic help is pretty cool. Codelobster PHP Edition also supports code collapsing, allowing you to shrink up entire blocks of code so that you can find what you want or need to work in quickly and easily. This is really cool to have in a free tool, and the fact that Codelobster PHP Edition has it is pretty awesome.

Another big plus is that the app also supports a plug-in architecture, so if you want to include, JQuery, SQL or other snippets and objects in your code, you can. However, those plug-ins may not be free, so you need to be aware of that.