Eight PHP IDEs Compared

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Rick Grehen provides an in-depth comparative review of eight PHP IDEs: ActiveState's Komodo IDE, CodeLobster PHP Edition, Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT), MPSoftware's phpDesigner, NetBeans IDE for PHP, NuSphere's PhpED, WaterProof's PHPEdit, and Zend Studio. 'All of these PHP toolkits offer strong support for the other languages and environments (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL database) that a PHP developer encounters. The key differences we discovered were in the tools they provide (HTML inspector, SQL management system) for various tasks, the quality of their documentation, and general ease-of-use,' Grehen writes.'"

Comments

Do any of them assess performance?

[jeffmeden]

This is not a troll, I swear! Are there any good performance assessment tools used during development? If so, do they work well with any of these IDEs? I don't do a lot of PHP work but it would be nice to have a tool that could audit code, advise on which lines were the most resource-intensive, and recommend lighter weight procedures.

Eclipse PDT?

[KermodeBear]

Eclipse PHP Development Tools 2.1.2 received an overall score of 8.8. I'm not sure why. I have tried this on several occasions and I find the interface confusing, the software itself bloated and slow, and the internal plugin manager is always broken and can't download dependencies correctly - if at all.

Sure, there are posts all over the place that are supposed to help fix these issues: Download X from Y, and A from B, and then modify this configuration, and, and, and... ...and I shouldn't have to. It should 'just work'. I spent half a day trying to get the SFTP plugin installed and working and I gave up. I don't have time for that.

My personal favorite, as far as 'large' IDEs go, is Zend Studio - the last version before they moved over onto the Eclipse Framework.

Re:Left out my favorite

[Xest]

Yeah, they also gave Zend 9/10 for tools and 10/10 for Value when it's basically just Eclipse PDT with a toolbar button for the command line tool that comes free with the Zend framework and costs $399 per year for the privilege.

Well, I suppose it can do more if you pay an extra $1195 per year for Zend server. Did I mention that Zend server is basically little more than just a pre-configured Apache setup?

Perhaps I've been spoilt by Visual Studio which actually costs much less and gives you far more, or the fact that 99.99% of Zend Studio's functionality is just inherited from Eclipse which is free, but the idea of giving Zend Studio 10/10 for value is er, baffling to say the least- at least their 9/10 for tools can be somewhat justified by the fact most of them are just inherited from the free tools Eclipse provides.

I suppose at least they still gave positive reviews of the other IDEs, but the idea that Zend Studio is somehow better than them, well, I'm not really sure there's a word for how simply not true that is.

So er yeah, still, most the article is probably one of the finest loads of bollocks I've ever seen which is quite impressive, sseing as I've often made the mistake of reading The Register which is basically like a bollocks farm.

you dont need to quote developers.

[unity100]

as if php is not something worth developing on or those who develop on it cannot be called real developers.

i am working in the industry since 2003 as a php developer and i use notepad++. it works very well too.