If you’re a programmer, web developer or maybe a WordPress theme/plugin developer who does a lot of coding in PHP, you’re gonna like this. I’m sure at one time or another, you’ve had the experience where you were out of your office or home, don’t have your computer with you and needed to do some quick programming but couldn’t because you didn’t have a PHP or source code editor at hand. PHPanywhere solves that problem by letting you code on the go.

PHPanywhere is a web based free Integrated Development Environment or IDE for the PHP language, in other words it is an application that gives developers all the code editing capabilities they need to develop PHP applications online. It includes a real-time syntax code editor with support for all web formats and a powerful FTP editor.

Screenshots:
PHP Editor

FTP Client

File Permissions

Main Features:

• Real-time Syntax Code Editor
• Projects – Create and use projects to group files you commonly use together, so you can easily open them next time you need to work on the project.
• File Permissions – Change your file and folder permissions using PHPanywhere’s ftp explorer.
• Messages Windows – Your every action is now logged in the window at bottom of the screen, so you can now easily track changes you made using PHPanywhere.
• Powerful FTP explorer – This is a full-blown FTP explorer. You can add as many servers as you like, edit files, create/delete files or folders and you can even edit the permissions on folders. It will definitely satisfy all you FTP needs.

Real-time Syntax Code Editor features:

• Syntax highlighting
• Smart indentation for each language
• Code folding
• Full internationalization
• Unlimited undo/redo (now handled on client (browser) side, no more waiting for server response)
• Unlimited tabs
• Find and replace feature (New Feature)
• Displays line numbers (New Feature)
• Code auto completion, snippets (New Feature)
• Displays line numbers (New Feature)

Aside from these features, you can also change the look and feel of PHPanywhere with different ready-made skins. And because PHPanywhere isn’t installed on the computer, you can use it anywhere and anytime. You can use it even if you don’t have administrator privileges on a certain computer and you don’t have to ask permission from your IT department. You can also use the FTP even if the FTP port is blocked by your school or office’s firewall.

If you’re working on a group project, you can easily share files among your groupmates and let them work on it without having to worry about having duplicate files. PHPanywhere enables real-time document collaboration which makes it an ideal tool for any work environment. PHPanywhere is still in beta so we can expect some changes and new features to be added.

Since PHPanywhere is web-based and hosted on their servers, some of the information may be transferred uncrypted and can be transmitted over various networks. If you’re working on very important files that contain sensitive information and don’t want to take the risk, then another solution would be to have an installer of your favorite source code editor like Notepad++ or install the Portable Notepad++ on your USB drive and bring it along with you anywhere you go.

I also have my computer with me but I’m bookmarking this site because I might need it in the near future. For the same reason, I’m sharing it with you today (those who work with PHP coding/programming), because you don’t know when PHPanywhere might come in handy one of these days. Btw, you need to sign up for an account before you can start using PHPanywhere.

For those of you who do coding and programming on PHP, would you use an online service like PHPanywhere? What other features would like to see added to PHPanywhere? Do you know of other alternative resources or services that let you code on the go?