PhpStorm 5.0 and WebStorm 5.0 include live editing preview

JetBrains has released version 5.0 of its JavaScript WebStorm web development environment and the lightweight PhpStorm PHP IDE that incorporates the WebStorm system.

WebStorm 5.0 includes a new Live Editing Preview that shows the result of code changes in HTML, CSS and JavaScript documents in real time. Its code editor now also supports JSDoc tags and Google's Closure Compiler. Version 5.0 of PhpStorm offers new features for working with the Symfony2 and Yii frameworks, including a new MVC (Model View Controller) view and Symfony2 and Drupal-compliant code formatting options.

PhpStorm's older heuristic-based type inference engine has been replaced with a data-flow analysis engine which improves the editor's ability to detect variable types and to offer better coding assistance. It also helps with the code quality checking, which is now able to detect a range of runtime errors and improved unused and unreachable code detection. The new Live Editing Preview from WebStorm, which is also present in the PHP development environment, currently only works in Google's Chrome browser.

Project-specific PHP_CodeSniffer coding standards can now be specified more easily. The developers have also implemented many new features in the IDE's SQL and database support, including live database schema refactoring, stored procedure editing, the generation of schema migration scripts and an improved SQL completion feature.

Aside from PhpStorm and WebStorm, JetBrains has a range of products that support a variety of different programming languages including IDEs such as RubyMine, PyCharm and AppCode; these serve developers using Ruby, Python, HTML/JavaScript and Objective C. JetBrains originally made a name for itself with the IntelliJ IDEA Java development environment.

An individual developer licence for PhpStorm currently costs £38 and the commercial licence costs £155. WebStorm is priced at £23 for an individual licence and £77 for a commercial licence. (All prices are exclusive of VAT.) Licences for use with open source projects and in classroom environments are available free of charge for both products. Trial versions of both WebStorm and PhpStorm can also be downloaded.

(fab)