Custom Variable Typing in NetBeans

I must admit, over the past three to four years, I had an amazing development journey with NetBeans IDE. From version 6.8 to today’s new 7.2, NetBeans has been pretty much the center of my development tools. Its support for multiple languages allows me to switch between projects of different syntax quickly without having to re-learn the editor’s interface.

From the standard IDE features such as code completion, typing hinting, code colouring to integrated unit testing and support for files such as YAML and .htaccess - NetBeans has never failed or even disappointed me at the slightest. I love NetBeans IDE.

Packfire Framework for PHP was created through the care and guidance of NetBeans IDE and one of the greatest features is code completion and hinting. By typing something like:

 $object->

NetBeans will load the properties and methods of $object and show a list to you like this:

However, there are some object types which cannot be determined at code type and it isn’t helpful when you cannot get the auto-complete to show.

You can write variable typing comments to help you. NetBeans will parse these variable typing comments to set the type of the variables during development:

/* @var $query pMySqlLinq */

To easily generate the comment, simply type

vdoc

and press Tab. You can then get the auto-complete running for your variables. Read more about the custom variable typing on the Oracle’s blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/netbeansphp/entry/defining_a_variable_type_in