JetBrains has a new major release of PhpStorm, its PHP development environment with support for all the new stuff including Vagrant, Drupal, Zend 2, Web Components, TypeScript and easy debugging. 

PhpStorm 7 has support for the latest PHP 5.5, type inference and PHPDoc improvements, new refactorings (Move Static Member and Extract Interface), new code inspections and quick fixes. It also features improved PHP syntax coloring, which can be customized, to aid readability. It provides separate colors for: 

• Function and method declarations

• Function calls, static and instance method calls

• Classes and interfaces, static and instance class fields

New features in PhpStorm help with debugging and unit testing. Debugger Configuration Validation verifies the configuration of Xdebug and Zend Debugger and let you know if anything is missing and how to fix it - and if you have ever tried to configure either then you will know what a potential time saver this is.

Smart Setp-Into is a feature that allows you to choose the function to step into while debugging and this functionality also works with dynamic function calls. PhpStorm's PHPUnit on Server feature has also been "significantly reworked" 

The release extends its range of built in tools and its support for third party products. It natively integrates Vagrant, a tool for creating reproducible development environments. By scripting a virtual machine, Vagrant provides a way of sharing a development machine - other developers can launch an identical machine from within the IDE.

Support for Google App Engine now allows you to create your app, run it and deploy it to the GAE server without leaving PhpStorm. A new Drupal plug-in supports features of Drupal 6 and 7, some of which also work for Drupal 8. There's also support for Zend Framework 2, Symfony 2 and other PHP frameworks.

PhpStorm introduces a new Web toolkit with support for front-end web technologies including three alternative sets of JavaScript templates, EJS, Handlebars and Mustache. It introduces Initial support for Web Components and the Stylus stylesheet language. For those working with Saas, it now supports Compass. Its improved JavaScript debugger now has a Variables view (only for Google Chrome and Node.js) and an Elements tab for inspecting elements of the current web-page and showing its contents live.

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PhpStorm 7 provides support for latest TypeScript 0.9, while support for other languages, such as CoffeeScript and Dart, has been improved, and there is a new structure view for LESS and Sass. Integration with GitHub has been improved, allowing GitHub users to make pull requests right from the IDE.

In this video Maarten Balliauw, Technical Evangelist at JetBrains, provides an overview of new features in PhpStorm 7.

PhpStorm 7 is available for Linux, Windows and OSX. There is a 30 day trial you can download and the personal licence is 89 Euros plus VAT - open source projects and courses can use it for free. Check out the JetBrains website for other pricing information.