Got an email today from Zend about their new Zend Studio beta. I’m interested to see this, because I use Zend Studio at work, and I like it, its just quite expensive. I’ve been trialing different IDEs at home for a while now, but I havent got on very well with either Komodo nor PDT as I find that I am just not as productive when using them - neither are particularly PHP orientated and I feel I have to work in the prescribed way, rather than how I am comfortable.
This new beta is Zend Studio for Eclipse (codename Neon), so I’m not sure how different it will be to PDT (or the vanilla Zend Studio for that matter) but I figure its worth a look.
and if anyone has any recommendations for any other (win32 or linux) IDEs that are worth trialling, I’d love to hear from you.
09/10/2007 at 11:32pm Permalink
I am not 100% on this, but I was under the impression that a normal Zend Studio license was valid for a physical person, not one workstation. Meaning you can install it at home and use the same license at work and at home. When you check the about does it show it licensed to you or to a company?
10/10/2007 at 1:32am Permalink
I’ve been testing Zend Neon for quite some time, and, while I have to admit it’s good in a lot of ways, they really messed a lot of things up. It took me two hours to figure out how to simply change the colors/fonts (I’m a big advocate a using programming centric fonts). The whole interface itself is nothing more than a mashup. It looks like a lot of different people threw a lot of different things together and hoped it’d work out, and a lot of things don’t work/aren’t supported yet (I think this is mainly the Eclipse devs fault, not Zend’s). All in all I’d give Zend Neon 4/10 due to it’s difficult, clunky UI. My advice, keep to studio, I did, I am looking forward to the final version however, I’m hoping they clean up their act, as I’ve said, there are a lot of good things in Neon, but the bad, sadly, outwieghs them.
10/10/2007 at 9:36am Permalink
There is also PHPEdit, which seems to be (in my eyes) the best one for Windows.
How does it come that nobody mentions its when there’s an IDE talk going on?
You can find it at http://waterproof.fr/products/PHPEdit/.
10/10/2007 at 10:22am Permalink
Hi,
I use PDT and EditPlus2.
BTW, It would be great to have a review on Neon and compare it with PDT.
Sincerely,
Alex
10/10/2007 at 10:23am Permalink
@Josh,
The copy I use at work is licensed to them, not to me, so I can’t use it at home. The reason i’ve been trialing different ones is that I want my own copy, but I want to make sure its the right decision before I commit any of my own money
10/10/2007 at 10:25am Permalink
@clynx,
I’ve got the PHPEdit trial downloaded, I just haven’t got around to trialing it yet. I’m trying to give each IDE at least a couple of weeks for me to get my head around its individual nuances. Should have mentioned it in my original post tho.
10/10/2007 at 1:25pm Permalink
Try PSPad also I find I would like an editor between the auto complete and debug of Zend and the editor of PSpad and EditPlus2.
As I think they could have a few more text tools in Zend, as i tend to have to clean up data or clean and reformat code or html and need to pull it around a bit.
10/10/2007 at 2:09pm Permalink
@Tristan
I use a text editor (edit+ 2 or vim or sed) for any bulk text operations I need to make but I believe that PHPEdit has a code formatter build in. Waterproof software used to do a standalone code formatter that worked pretty well, but I dont think thats available anymore.
Zend Neon (and possibly PDT) has a detailed code formatter as well (which is a big plus for me)
10/10/2007 at 2:34pm Permalink
I use phpEclipse via EasyEclipse for PHP (http://www.easyeclipse.org/site/distributions/php.html) and have found it very feature full. Again, you will have the clunkier UI, but it does work rather nicely. The debugging features are great and the ability to hover over a function and Ctrl-Click to go to the resource that function is defined is invaluable. There are so many good things about the Eclipse base that are helpful, I tend to look past the not-so-perfect UI.