Opinion

Whatever else comes out of Zends involvement with the Eclipse Foundation will show in time. But right now you can take advantage of the first perk a pre-packaged version of the Eclipse PHP IDE.

This came just in time for me because I was reaching the cut-off date for trying Zend Studio and comparing it to Active State Komodo. Here's a bit of my history with PHP IDEs and editors.

A year or so ago I finally gave up trying to use Homesite as an editor because of its lack of unicode support I floundered around with other editors and IDEs. I tried PHPedit for a while but dropped it when they Waterproof went completely commercial and I could no longer get upgrades. As a free beta PHPedit was nice but it was not worth any cash at the time. I had a brief encounter with HTMLkit but found it too slow. I installed Zend Studio but never used it because on my previous computer (1.2ghz cpu and 756mb ram)Zend Studio ran horribly slow. So I went to Active State komodo. Komodo was nice and fast and although it have its share of problems it proved to be a worthy replacement for Homesite. Alas after a time though Komodos User interface gave me fits. Komodo just had too many non-working things and too many non-intuitive workings. But the final straw that caused me to give Zend Studio another try was the fact the Komodo just did not have a good search.

In the last sixty days Zend Studio has been a good development tool. Zend is a very strong contender for the top spot in any contest for the top 10 PHP IDEs but it would not win. Small things like not being able to close a file by clicking on a close icon or stacking file window tabs rather than loading them into a horizontal scroller make Zend Studio seem amateurish. The worst disappointement in using Zend Studio is that I never could get the debugger to work. In a total of 5 months in using the program and after reading dozens of support answers along with about a hundred forum posts the debugging of PHP using Zend with XAMPP, Wamp5, IIS 5 or its internal server just never worked. Zend Studio could not see the webserver.

When I first opened Eclipse I expected to find something similar to Zend Studio. But was I surprised. Eclipse PHP IDE is nothing like Zend Studio. It actually gives what I thought I would get from using a commercial application like Zend Studio. This shows that opensource software can be better than and compete with commercially vended products.

Happy Publishing!

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