JetBrains,the creators of IntelliJ IDEA, ReSharper and other intelligent, productivity-enhancing tools for software developers, have announced the general availability of PhpStorm 5.0, the new release of their advanced PHP IDE.

While maintaining its focus on PHP code quality and all-around developer productivity, PhpStorm 5.0 also extends its support for modern PHP frameworks. This major release brings out new features for Symfony2 & Yii projects, in addition to the previously supported Zend framework and Drupal.

“Helping PHP developers constantly improve the quality of their code remains our number one priority as we plan additions to the IDE, be it new framework support, editor features or something else,” said Alexey Gopachenko, PhpStorm project lead. “This release brings a data-flow-based type analysis engine which significantly improves the precision of the code analyser, with no additional code annotations needed. We also believe that the new Live Edit mode will be a lot of help for web developers looking to boost their coding productivity.”

The key additions in PhpStorm 5.0 include:
• New, more sophisticated type inference engine for PHP variables and class fields.
• New MVC view for Symfony2 & Yii projects.
• Built-in PSR1/PSR2, Symfony2 and Drupal compliant code formatting.
• The ability to easily specify your own PHP CodeSniffer project-specific rule set.
• Many additions in SQL/Databases support, including live database schema refactoring, stored procedures editing, schema migration scripts generation, and improved SQL completion.
• ‘Live Edit’ mode for PHP/HTML/CSS/JS code with instant page preview in the browser.
• Many important improvements for editing JavaScript and CSS/Sass/LESS.
Download JetBrains PhpStorm 5.0 and try it free for 30 days at http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm.

In addition to affordably priced personal and commercial licenses, even cheaper academic licenses are introduced with PhpStorm 5.0, for non-commercial use. Each type of license includes free PhpStorm updates for 1 year after the purchase date, covering major new releases. See http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/buy.