Which windows application for writing PHP codes?

Don’t know about compiling php? and debugging is also foreign to me.

But Notepad++ is awesome.

For Windows I prefer Aptana, its free and works really well.

http://www.aptana.com/

For Linux I prefer Kate

apt-get install kate

*Note: PHP is an interpreted language, so there is no compiling; same applies for Python

To totally confuse the issue, PHP is an interpreted language, but there are several different ways to compile it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Compilers

I’ve used Aptana and I like it fine. I’ve heard that crimson editor is pretty good. PHPedit is free if you’re a student.

Basically those “compilers” can do quite a few things. One is they can obfuscate the code which makes it extremely hard to read and or reverse engineer. Others may however convert it into byte code that can be utilized by the .NET framework, or the Java Virtual Machine for example.

There are also other situations like PHP GTK where they try to use the language to create desktop applications (I don’t remember if it needs compiling or not). Either way it seems that many try to push the language a little too far in my opinion ;p If your wanting to do stuff like that just go with Java or python, it’s much easier to work with. But that is sort of getting off topic.

I will add however another good IDE that I have used, not for PHP however but I do know it has an extension, is NetBeans. It’s mostly used for Java development, but it is an outstanding IDE and its free.

i would use notepad++ because its free and awesome. just search notepad++ on google. It’s great for all web development. Honestly though all you really need is a server with php enabled and notepad.