The impact that the Eclipse Platform has made on application development is amazing and unprecedented in many ways. From the story of its birth to its wide feature set, there is nothing bland about this product. The Platform has created commercial product opportunities around it and gives a bountiful amount of freedom and control to end users. This has led to widespread industry adoption and corporate support.
The Platform’s best known component, the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), alone is on par with, if not outright excels against, many similar commercial offerings. Originally a Java IDE, Eclipse makes an excellent PHP development environment with the help of the PHPEclipse plug-in. PHP developers experienced with IDEs will enjoy its extensibility and power and if you have never used an IDE on a PHP project, Eclipse is a great tool to get started with. It has everything you would need in an IDE, runs on many platforms, and best of all, it’s completely free.