Oh, I'm going to write a LOT more about this, but here's what I need now...

Don't worry. My latest decision is actually going to be the focus of a LOT of upcoming blog posts as I work my way through this, but yeah, I'm moving over to PHP from ColdFusion after almost 15 years as a ColdFusion developer. There are a LOT of reasons why I'm doing it, most of which I'm going to try to capture in a bunch of upcoming blog posts, including blogging about what the experience of moving over is actually like, but for now, I really am looking at one thing, and one thing only: An IDE.

I haven't been a huge Eclipse user, but I'm familiar with it, in a more, "hey, I know you, I have some friends who talk about you a lot" kind of way. For those that aren't familiar with me, or live under a rock, I'm the lead-developer-slash-digital-specialist-slash-interactive-director at an Advertising Agency. As such, my whole world of development experience tends to be on the "design implementation" side of development. I create boutique websites for clients that are more creative and marketing solutions driven. I don't create intranet applications, or enterprise applications. I haven't had much use for Flex (More on that later) and the Flash Remoting work I've done over the last decade could best be described as "Here's what we were able to sell the client, given their budget and marketing needs".

I started developing web applications using ColdFusion around 1995-96 and started with HomeSite. Once Macromedia entered into a licensing agreement with Allaire and started licensing a copy with Dreamweaver, I started using both Dreamweaver and Homesite. Around 1999 Dreamweaver became "Dreamweaver UltraDev" and after attending the Max Conference that year, I switched over to using Dreamweaver for all of my development and in 2001 when Macromedia acquired Allaire, that was all I needed to cement Dreamweaver as my principle IDE. I never looked back, and never needed to.

Now, I'm ready to move on.

I develop mostly (okay... exclusively) on the Windows side using a MacBook pro that's running BootCamp. I've owned my MacBook now for about four years and have honest-to-God NEVER booted into Macintosh. I probably boot up in Mac OS about two times a year...if that.

HOWEVER, part of the process of moving over is going to be re-learning how to develop web apps on the Macintosh. As my college friends can attest, I was the first Macintosh user on the block, the ONLY person at my college who actually OWNED a Macintosh, and all of my Biology Undergraduate work was done exclusively on a Macintosh. When I went back to college to get a second degree in Computer Science, I went back AS a Macintosh developer, and convinced my professor to let me turn in work using CodeWarrior.

Then it happened. I had to take Assembly.

Once I walked down that path, I never came back, having purchased a Toshiba Laptop running Windows 98 in order to do my Assembly assignments. My conversion to the Dark Side was complete.

As a result, here we are over a decade later, and I work in an Ad Agency as the ONLY Windows machine in the building (well... my department is windows-based) surrounded by Macintoshes. You can only imagine the Sisyphusian life I lead constantly pushing that boulder up endless hills.

Okay, so where does that leave me? And why do I need you? I want a new IDE. I want a cross-platform IDE that runs on Windows and Mac, is FREE, open source, and plays well with PHP and MySQL. Ideally, it'd also be best friends with CSS and have a "design mode" but that's less of a requirement than playing nice with PHP in a cross-platform kinda way. I'd like to set up both my Windows side and my Mac side as almost "mirrored" development environments and as seamlessly as possible, move between the two. I really want to do most of the work/learning on the Macintosh side, but I have legacy work in place that uses SQL/ColdFusion that I'll have to be able to get in and work on so I'd like to be able to slowly integrate PHP and MySQL solutions in an easy, somewhat effortless way.

So here's what I want. Turn me on to some IDEs and let me know if you have any recommendations. I'm tempted to try Eclipse as my solution. Do any of you out there use Eclipse for PHP/MySQL development? If so, do you like it? Hate it? What else would you recommend?

My time line for this isn't really compressed in any way. I'm meeting with a colleague on December 31st to sit down and set up my Macintosh side as a working development environment, and after the start of the year, I'll be programming in earnest. Right now I'm just reading, looking for PHP references, and learning a little bit about MySQL.

So hook me up interwebs! Turn me on to a good IDE!