PHP development environment and configuration

Hi I'm looking for the most convenient, easy to use, yet powerful web development environment for a project. There are:

1. Eclipse

and others (PHP cake ?)

and subversion ?

Which framework is better ?

I'm looking for a free one. My web server would be XAMPP on a Windows 7 home premium.

I also need to use AJAX/javascript (aren't they the same?)

Webservices also would be used. (WSDL) mainly...

Connection to a home server is required as well...(with an existing domain/hosting management panel)

There may be more than 1 database involved. I may need to host it up after the development is finished.


Thanks guys please advice. I know there are many experienced users here.

No hope.

IDE/Editor
Eclispe
PHPDesigner
Aptana
Nodepad++

Frameworks
Zend
Cake
CodeIgniter

For AJAX/Javascript look into Jquery.

As far as the home server goes, what do you mean? Most development environments don't require any sort of domain attached to them for public access.

As far as the number of databases, for local development you can have as many as your software permits. XAMPP wont limit you to anything.

There are a lot of hosts out there, including Ozzu. When you get to that stage check out http://ozzu.com/hosting/

For IDE, do you mean you use all of them (switching time to time?) ..**I asked because I know some people even have 2 frameworks working at a time.

I was thinking about Eclipse (do I need to get the specific built for PHP ? / or just Eclipse as a whole in general ?..)

I started using Cake yesterday - hey it was rapid. I'm only having trouble with it now in terms of books sources, and samples sources with examples. (Can anyone recommend some place to get it for free (ebooks) ? )I am just saving more money for future hosting stage. Also, I noticed the query numbers at the bottom of the page as I walked through their tutorial(s), is it going to be like that ??

What do you mean by jquery ?

The home server goes like this. I'm data mining and storing the data into my own server at home. So, I only need to retrieve these data when I think necessary/when my programme query it automatically in a range of time.

Laptop/(any other clients) --> PC/server (home)
<--
--> Localhost / Remote
<--

Er, is the above clear ?

I'm not storing the data in another place because I want to keep the data -- research, confidential. Besides, it is mainly about getting lots of data and doing some ETL stuff here. (Extract, Transform and Loading).

Thanks !

Wait.. I left out webservices... I guess they already have built-in for the framework I selected.

Do I need to install additional plug-ins for that ??