Zend.com's Studio 5

[silly rabbit]

Anybody have a chance to checkout 21 day professonal version yet??

Zend Studio 5 delivers a comprehensive set of editing, debugging, analysis,
optimization and database tools. Zend Studio 5 speeds development cycles and simplifies complex projects.

[Alan @ CIT]

I'm still using v4, but will be upgrading next week in the hope it's more stable.

[Guest190829]

Does Zend really help? I use a regular notepad, and it's fine...but this seems interesting...

[filburt1]

Zend Studio 5 speeds development cycles and simplifies complex projects.
As of ZS4, that means in between crashes, bugs, and lack of features compared to other IDEs (at least other Java IDEs).

[Alan @ CIT]

Using Zend IDE to develop in PHP is a god-send. I've vastly cut down my development time since switching to Zend.

Some useful features that help when writing vB add-ons:

The project inspector shows you a list of all classes / functions within your project. In this case, the vb folder is added as a project folder, so it catalogs all of vB's classes and functions.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v74/sts-wags/Zend%20IDE/sidebar_classes.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v74/sts-wags/Zend%20IDE/sidebar_functions.jpg

Another useful feature is inline error checking - in this case, I've forgotten to put the semi-colon on the end of the previous line:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v74/sts-wags/Zend%20IDE/inline_errors.jpg

It also saves time by trying to auto-complete variable, class and function names for you - eg, for functions:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v74/sts-wags/Zend%20IDE/function_suggestions.jpg

It also lets you know what the arguments for a function are, and the order and defaults:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v74/sts-wags/Zend%20IDE/function_argument_hints.jpg

It's got various other very handy functions as well. For example, I could right click on the "can_moderate" text above, and chose "Go To Declaration" and it would open up the file that can_moderate() is defined in, and take me to the correct line in that file.

Other features include a tool that Analyzes your code and spots things like un-used variables, variables that are only used once (probably typos), things like using a single = instead of == (eg, if (x = 1) instead of if (x == 1))

I've been using it for a little over 2 years now, and nowadays, I couldn't live without it :)