Justin Silverton lists the five tools that a developer needs in a new post over his blog. They include, Crimson Editor, VS.php, ez_sql/ez_results mysql wrapper library, Smarty Template Engine and mysql gui bundle 5.0.

Crimson Editor (Free)

According to Justin, the program is not only fast in loading time, but also small in size. While it can serve as a good replacement for Notepad, it also offers many features for programming languages such as HTML, C/C++, Perl, PHP and Java.

VS.php (Commercial, 30 day trial)

VS.Php is a PHP integrated development environment based on Visual Studio. With VS.Php you can design, develop, debug and deploy PHP applications within the Visual Studio IDE. VS.Php key features are around providing PHP and Smarty editing capabilities as well as its ability to debug PHP scripts locally as well as remotely. It is a nice editor because it offers code completion for all PHP function names. There is also a stand-alone edition that can be installed in case you do not own a copy of visual studio .net 2005, Justin writes.

ez_sql/ez_results - mysql wrapper library (Free)

According to Justin, it features:

• Disk caching
• It is one PHP file that you include at the top of your script. Then, instead of using standard PHP database functions listed in the PHP manual, you use a much smaller (and easier) set of ezSQL functions.
• It has debug functions that allow you to see what’s going on in your SQL code.
• Most ezSQL functions can return results as Objects, Associative Arrays, or Numerical Arrays.
• Works with Smarty templating language.

Smarty Template Engine (Free)

One of Smartys primary design goals is to facilitate the separation of application code from presentation. Typically, the application code contains the business logic of your application, written and maintained in PHP code. Programmers maintain the code. The presentation is the way your content is presented to the end user, which is written and maintained in template files. Template designers maintain the templates, Justin explains.

mysql gui bundle 5.0 (Free)
A suite of GUI tools that includes, MySQL Administrator, MySQL Query Browser, MySQL Migration Toolkit, and MySQL Workbench, Justin concludes.