We love NetBeans! It neatly fills our needs for developing php applications. It does seem to have some minor annoyances, but at least one of them can easily be overcome by using Ant. NetBeans with php allows you to designate a local web server for testing. The IDE automatically will copy files to the web server… well, most of the time. Sometimes, for whatever reason, NetBeans, doesn’t know if it needs to copy files.