Hi all, today we would like
to inform all of you that now you have a chance
to improve NetBeans via NetBeans PHP Community Council. The author of this activity is Timur Poperecinii and he would like
to tell you a few words about it.
Hello passionate technical people,
First of all let me introduce myself: my name is Timur, I’m a developer from Moldova (that little country between Romania and Ukraine), I develop mostly in .NET and JQuery, but I love
to learn more, not being an expert I am familiar with Java (Struts2, Play), PHP (Symfony2), Ruby (Rails), Sencha Touch 2 and other technologies. I was “introduced” in PHP recently by a client of mine who requested
to make the work specifically in PHP.
Let me tell you a little story about my experience with open source and IDEs: when I was studying in university in 2007 I think, I did a simple little application in PHP and thought “Damn, if only there was a good IDE for PHP so I could relax and no having
to remember all the function names”, then when I searched on internet pretty much everyone was using Vim or Emacs on Linux, but it had no autocomplete anyway, just syntax highlighting. I remember using some tool like Notepad++ I think.
Nowadays everything changed, we have highlighting and autocomplete for about all standard things in PHP in many IDEs. I use NetBeans for PHP, and I really am happy with the experience I have there with standard PHP code, but for frameworks I still think there is lots of room for improvements. For example we have some Symfony 2 and Twig support. But I’d love
to see more of that coming, for example I’m a big fan of file templates, where the main goal is
to not waste time on writing over and over again something that can be generated, and it counts even more when you don’t have a lot of autocomplete. So what I thought, “Hey I know Java a little, and NetBeans has plugins, so may be it worth trying
to do a file templates plugin”, and so I did, you can find details about my Unified Udevi Symfony2 Plugin for NetBeans 7.2 on my blog. It wasn’t hard, and it even was fun!
Give back
to open source
Now think a little, NetBeans is an open source project and PHP support is just a part of it, so the resources are pretty limited in this area. But we as a community that uses this product, want
to have the best possible experience with PHP and frameworks(!!!). So why don’t we GIVE BACK
TO OPENSOURCE ? Imagine an IDE that can do all the things you wanted + it is free. Now how far is NetBeans from that point? I guess not so far – you might miss a little niche thing that you use on a daily basis, but then the question appears why don’t you make it happen on your own?
NetBeans PHP Community Council
What I proposed is
to create a NetBeans PHP Community Council that will be formed of people willing
to change something, willing
to create plugins for their own needs and for the needs of the community, test the plugins created by them too, and basically evolve NetBeans in direction they want
to reach. I already talked with the NetBeans PHP team. They are only happy
to help this Council, with technical advises, opening some APIs we might need
to have access
to, and other things. One important thing
to mention is that this Council is a Community project, so though we’ll have direct discussions with NetBeans PHP Dev team, NetBeans is not the leading force here, it is the community. You can see more details about the goals and structure I proposed at NetBeans PHP Community Council wiki page.
We use this mail list:
[email protected] for discussions and topics related
to the Council.
How can I join
To join the NetBeans PHP Community Council please
send an email
to [email protected] with the subject of the mail starting with [Council New Member]. You can subscribe
to this mail list here:http://netbeans.org/projects/php/lists.
in your mail please indicate your location, age and experience both in Java and PHP. I need these data
to assign you
to a team.
A response will be send
to you with your next assignment and some people
to contact.
I really hope that you’ll make a step forward and try
to make your everyday use of NetBeans even more fun.
