New PHP tools launched by Eclipse Foundation

The Eclipse Foundation has announced the launch of new PHP development tools as part of its open source efforts.

This latest release of Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) adds support for PHP-based object-oriented programming through enhanced tools for navigating and searching PHP code more quickly and easily.

It also includes override indicators that visually tag overridden PHP methods and a host of usability improvements, such as a new indexing and caching engine, Mark Occurrences indicator and sophisticated Code Assist feature.

The Eclipse Foundation said the new PDT release would be particularly useful for those aiming to create simple PHP applications, as well as for Java programmers looking for a consistent PHP environment.

"PDT is one of our most popular downloads at Eclipse. Since the initial release it has been downloaded over one million times. Clearly PDT adoption has been very successful in the Eclipse and PHP communities," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation.

The latest version of PHP - which is a general purpose scripting language that can be embedded into HTML and is run on a web hosting server - was launched by The PHP Group last month.