Zend Studio 5

[filburt1]

Wow. It sucks a lot less than 3. What they've added:

1. Code folding (yes!).
2. PHP 5 support (not applicable for vB development; you need to assume a PHP 4 installation)
3. Other stuff that I'll probably never use and hence don't know about (they have SQL support but I use phpMyAdmin)

What's still wrong with it:

1. Bugs. My god, the bugs. It will lock up every now and then for no reason (I think the Java VM is garbage collecting but there's no way to tell). Folding breaks as you type code; it will expand everything below the caret once it detects a syntax error. Eclipse gets it right. It also visually (but thank god, not literally) deleted half the code in one of my classes due to a folding mishap. Reopening the file revealed it was still there.

2. Eclipse features missing: semicolon typethrough (type ; near the end of a line, and it will put it past the closing ], ), etc.).

3. Antialiasing. Nothing in the interface supports ClearType despite the support for it in Java.

I wish Zend would give up and make a huge plugin for Eclipse. It's designed specifically for this sort of thing.

http://www.zend.com/

I'm using it instead of Dreamweaver, now.

[Guest190829]

I was going to be Zend, you think just using Eclipse is a better choice?

[filburt1]

The Eclipse platform is better than the Zend IDE, but it has no built-in PHP support, only Java.

[Guest190829]

The Eclipse platform is better than the Zend IDE, but it has no built-in PHP support, only Java.

I need an IDE for php, I guess Zend is my only option...

[Revan]

Personally Im very happy with using Dreamweaver for my Web Development.
I hand-type all my code and (for XHTML) use Firefox/IE/Opera to preview code. I never use the WYSIWYG editor so the quality of this I cannot advertise about.
Dreamweaver 8 handles code folding quite nicely (I just recently discovered the advantages of this) and its syntax highlighting works like a charm for everything apart from those <<< or whatever, but I rarely see them and never use them.

[filburt1]

The code folding in Dreamweaver is less buggy than Zend Studio's, but it's also quite lame how it's implemented: you have to manually select the text to fold; it doesn't search out braces, comment blocks, etc. It does stay folded, though.

[bchertov]

Thanks for the info about Zend!

I was looking at Php ED. It first look, it looks great. Anybody have any experience with it?

Does Dreamweaver offer the kind of Php support the Zend/Eclipse/PHP Ed do?

[Trigunflame]

Ive tried virtually every popular php editor out there, the best *un-buggy* is probably nusphere phpeditor, which supports about everything you can think of.. live error reporting, phpdoc, dbg debugging, profiling, folding, cvs/svn etc..

But I just think the editor is too... bulky like zend. If you want a good phpeditor that has about all the features you want and integrates into a stable platform I would suggest using phpeclipse which is an Eclipse plugin. Note: phpeclipse is made featurerich because it hooks off of eclipse which is pretty much infinitely expandable..

I can pretty much say without a doubt after going through 15 or so of the "Best" editors, phpeclipse is the best PHP IDE out there.

ps: Use the stable 1.7 branch for now, 1.8 will bring lots of features/fixes I hear..