Web Development and KDE4

KDE3 had pretty good applications for web development, the most prominent and useful Quanta3 (actually I'm still a power user of Quanta3). The KDE4 version of Quanta (Quanta4) will be a major rewrite, based on kdevplatform, the base of KDevelop4.
While KDevelop4 just will have it's Beta6 release soon and is usable for daily work, Quanta4 is unfortunately not.

Well, no problem, you might think - just use Quanta3. But for many people it's not:

• Kde3 packages are considered as legacy by distributions and will be dropped sooner or later
• some distributions don't ship all packages needed for a full featured Quanta3 (eg missing kio-slaves - no fish://)
• a Kde3 application doesn't integrate that well - it's more like a Gtk application in a Kde4 session
  

Let's look ahead to the future of Quanta4:
As it's more or less a rewrite and not just porting the old code we have a lot of work to do. The major Quanta3 contributors Andras and Eric don't contribute anymore, so development is more or less on hold. But wait - Quanta4 is based on the same kdevplatform as KDevelop4 - right? That means any KDevelop4 plugin is a Quanta4 plugin. And a lot happed for those KDevelop4 plugins:

• php language support (that one really rocks)
  
• php documentation (very useful)
  
• script executor (execute scripts within KDevelop; needed for debugger)
  
• browser executor (open external browser; needed for debugger)
  
• xdebug debugger support (upcoming plugin for debugging php)
  

So active development happens for Quanta4 - we just use all KDevelop4 for testing the plugins.

If you use Quanta3 for php development, give KDevelop4 a try! The first beta release will get released together with KDevelop4 Beta6 the next days.