Zend Studio 7.0 vs Netbeans 6.8

it’s great to see all these suggestions.

I have used a majority of these IDEs but in my experience nothing holds a flame to NuShere’s PhpED, as far as performance and reliability.

It also takes care of any mark up validation, and integrates shell clients right into the IDE, so i no longer need putty or terminals open.

However it does currently lack the built in unit testing abilities of Eclipse based IDEs but with the built in shells it really isn’t necessary.

I’ve used them all, Zend, Netbeans, PhpEd, I always come back to vs.php. Works perfect for everything I’ve needed it to do, and the developer is very responsive to any support. Integrated debugging and all… check it out :slight_smile: And now you don’t need Visual Studio at all to install or use it

http://www.jcxsoftware.com/

I used to use Zend and really loved it (can’t remember the version), but I stay WELL clear of anything based on Eclipse now - buggy and slow as hell.

I’m currently using PHPEd, which has all the features of Zend i really loved, plus some more.

Thanks all of you for sharing your idea.
Hope to see some more participants :slight_smile:

It looks like I’m in minority because I use jEdit. As a free program it is very powerful but takes some time to configure it and add proper plugins in order to turn it into a PHP IDE. It’s not a full-featured IDE but it can find methods and classes within a project, show class structures and underline php errors. Very nice and customizable syntax highlighting (the supported programming language list is HUGE), some code completion (however nothing fancy), remote FTP/SFTP editing, integrated SVN, code templates, word-wrap, multiple and rectangular selection, code folding, pretty good auto-indentation, multiple string/word highlighting, file diffs, customizable keyboard shortcuts for virtually any command, customizable context menus, layout (docking) and toolbars, split-screen view, full-screen view, multiple window view, live text search, line markers, back/forward code navigation. And when you need something very specific you can record or program your own macro to automate any task you need. These are the features I use mostly but there are many other plugins to do many more things. And despite being written in java, jEdit runs pretty fast and starts up fast even with large projects. It has some minor bugs but nothing to be worried about and I never lost any data even when I was using development versions.

Some time ago I tried Eclipse but not long enough to be able to say much about it. I was very quickly put off by extremely slow startup and operation. And I wondered how can a serious editor lack word-wrap? At least I couldn’t find it there at the moment.

Eclipse (& so do Zend Studio 7.x) doesn’t have inbuilt word wrap feature, isn’t it strange ?Even a simple editor has this feature.

I have decided to go with NetBeans 7.x (in this version they have decided to fix the identation problem)
till then Zend Studio 7.x :frowning:

It looks like Zend is losing some big customers due to lack of wordwrap, I stumbled upon this: http://forums.zend.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=750

And I also learned that “Can not click and copy/move code by dragging anymore” - another basic functionality for me. I remember this drove me crazy in Eclipse, too.

In jEdit, there is live search, “find as you type”, it is called “incremental search bar” where you type a string and it is found and selected in the document immediately without having to press enter. I use it so often that I couldn’t live without it. Is this feature present in the following editors -

  • Komodo
  • PhpEd
  • NetBeans
  • PHPDesigner

?

Zend Studio 7.x really sucks.
@Lemon_Juice: I went through the link, i think it’s a shame on Zendians which upgraded Zend Studio 5.5x to 6.x to 7.x.
When Zend Studio 5.5x arrived first time it was totally outstanding.
Now look @ later versions - slowish & buggish. Moreover later version **cks.

Really there is split blame here. Zend do not want to heavily branch off of Eclipse and the Eclipse developers can be painfully stubborn.

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=68684

That is actually my pet hate of Eclipse. The whole silent majority thing just bugs me, open your mouth and the silent majority still has precedence as yoy are no longer one of them. PDT/Zend run in the new DLTK(http://www.eclipse.org/dltk/) part of Eclipse so it could be an uphill struggle to keep in sync if the branch deviates to much. Netbeans has something similar. Possibly why so much functionality was broken in PDT2.0 when they went to the DLTK, it was originally undocumented and never tested in transmission. Now when there is a problem now they add test cases to stop it happening again so may go smoother, though retrofitting test cases in itself is a hard task. If you have a bug log it and get a test case made, it shoud stop it coming back if the test case is any good.

It took 2.1 to actually make the thing workable again and thers is a strong corelation between the paid for and the free as PDT is the community edition.

Speed never really had a problem with that excluding it from virus scanners could solve, some of them target java files very agressively( McAffee is awful for this). Though Zend was always pretty temperemental to speed on certain machines and certain applications running( I couldn’t run Stream Down and Zend together, almost complete halt ) on another machine every time ITunes changed track the keyboard input would freeze.

I also run XP in classic mode and one of the proposed solutions was turn off native look and feel, some themes did not play nicely etc. Performance complaints have always be issued at Zend from when I used to frequent their forums 4-5 years ago( 5.5 had a lot of the same complaints). Sometimes it is worth looking outside the application at the actual system, things do not work together by magic and some things just do not play nicely together.

Though I would question the overall value of word wrap in code land due to a high reliance on that capability due to overuse of long lines could be indicative of an inelegant code base. I have a personal limit of 120 chars which I stick to even on my fairly dominating screen ( good for games ) as readability is sacrificed for the ease of just keeping typing.

If a method/function has 8 parameters( today I had to contend with a constructor with 18 which does === sucky code ), what call is easier to read? One with the parameters underneath each other( using 100 chars width ) or one where they are all in one line spreading to 160 -200 chars )? Which one of them when also using inline object instanciations in parameter calls is easier to read? Counting commas that that have to be excluded in brackets is not really fun.

On the SQL forums here there is a strong favouring to vertical column writing and parameter calls are no different, both are about easy visual cueing.

That is not to say word wrap is not a worthwhile feature, but picking a product that is more code cutter than IDE because of it is pretty lame. No PHP IDE can compete with something like IntelliJ/ReSharper, but they are on the path( being a weakly typed language makes it harder ). As PHP code gets bigger, more abstracted and verbose then to be competetive with Java development speed at such large scales it has to move in that direction. More competetive, more earning potential. There are many people who will promise to do what you do for $5 an hour( RentaCoder etc), the only way to beat them is work smarter, not harder. Some times that leads to a problem of things looking to easy so are easily offshoreable/transferable to another provider but that is another problem.

I am making quite a big assumption that they have a code quality problem and they are relying on tools to work around it, but everyone has a code quality problem of some form and those are really common ones.

Sometimes losing a feature means moving sideways to another feature, making scopes smaller, using inspection etc. If you want to open a file in PDT and it is camel cased( eg.SearchFormInputValidator ) just go crtl-shift-r SFIV and the list of file matches is highly accurate for very few keystrokes, work with prefixed libraries like Zend it can be a godsend. Hippy complete alt / and some completion magic occurs, it is pretty magic because I cannot fathom the rules as it is not scoped based like normal completion. It is like playing a highly rewarding fruit machine, try something you would not think would work but does.

A lot of stuff is undocumented/unknown in the OSS stuff so has to be explored, it is there because someone doesn’t work like you do but they may know something you don’t. It is like a treasure hunt finding it. Bug logs are very good places, reading all the keyboard short cuts is another.

Feature checkbox lists are pretty useless a lot of the time as things like code completion/ hyperlink code navigation are definitely not created equally. If it is free( like Netbeans/PDT ) probably undersold and under documented, if it is commercial then possibly oversold and under documented ( though always was very impressed with Nuspehere PHP Ed so it will be interesting to see how it has moved on ), Komodo when I last tried was highly adept at code cutting but low on over all project awareness. Similar to PHP Edit on that front, which was my first editor. Good for procedural, poor for OOP. Maybe reasonable for procedural oop.

One thing for sure code has a habit of being designed with the capability of that IDE/Editor in mind, use a different editor and it can come down to “Does the code suck” or does the “different editor suck”. Personal attachment to any editor probably means the the former gets blamed more wrongly than it should.

Anyway I have my own problems with Eclipse as a whole, and I am sure I would with Netbeans( they have a similar obstinancy issues like that MRU thing ). I used to prefer the old Zend for project management, one project at a time and rememeber where you were( handy for flicking in and out of projects if the environment calls for it ) and my only working choice now was PHP Eclipse or PDT. Moving from Zend which I used by choice to PHPEclipse was a very hard year, like stepping back 4 years in efficiency reliving workflow issues that had long since been resolved.

Download Netbeans,PDT 2.1 and Zend then explore heavily the things you never thought that could of done. Try the stuff that you didn’t do before because of lazyness/hassle.It is pretty interesting, opens new horizons and probably removes some of that constant brain pain that is only acceptable due it is accustomed in your favourite editor. Using Intellij the first time was fairly beautiful for me as it could automate practically all the chorish things I do by shift f6 or alt enter, it made me realise how much of my brain I was wasting on those chorish things. It was eye opening. That software is deep dark magic, almost code by banging my head on the keyboard.

A good tool is much more than one feature, but a balance of all features. I love PHP but it’s toolset does make me work hard on alot things that should be easy, making the hard things much harder due to being tired.

The reason I use Intellij as an example is if you are setting a bar on capability, set one that has real artistry and care. It is not always about doing but the artistry in how it allows you to do, which is the reason I bought Presonus Studio One versus Reaper/Cakewalk.

very literary English :wink:

From the post i came to know about new IDE: IntelliJ/ReSharper
I am about to download and give a try and surely let the forumian know.

Haven’t tried the PHP capabalities of Intellij so don’t know how good it is in comparison. It is something we can just look forward to one day as peoople are working on refactoring engines for PHP, it is easier to do them for strongly typed languages so they have been around longer for them.

It will be really nice one day not have to do file searches everytime a method/class needs to be renamed, just press F6( or whatever ) and have everything change for you throughout a project safely. Zend supposedley now does that to a degree but that source is being kept away from PDT( they may be doing their own) as there must be some reason to pay money. I haven’t played with Zend in a while, the company I work for will pay a lot for some things but equipment/tools is not really one of them so it will just make me grouchy. Though it definately costs more not having them then having them, hard to build a business case though as the cost is so spread and hidden.

Robert C Martin states in his clean code book if you don’t like the name change it, though it is not as easy as he makes out in PHP land. Especially for methods as other classes can use the same name. Handy having unit tests for that as usually something is not replaced properly, especially on bigger systems where you couldn’t click through everything even if you wanted to as there are too many unknown corners. Still it can be too time consuming to willingly do it however undescriptive the name.

I wasn’t sure how intelligable by the end I was, kind of blind from looking at eye bleeding ut_plsql tests all day. No auto complete, no mocking, no fun :). Bit lala.

Finally i came up with the following results:
NetBeans 6.8, NuSphere PHPEd & phpDesigner 7 are the finalist.

phpDesigner is simply the best in terms of performance & features. The main thing that i noticed were:

  • code folding feature missing (without which i can’t live)
  • Project folder is only for one project, it doesn’t show all the available projects

PHPEd is great but i didn’t like it’s syntax color(though it can be configured)

NetBeans 6.8 is good for smaller projects, for bigger projects it just keep on scanning and bit slower than other two. But it’s GUI & rest features are superb.

So, whts on your mind mate?

phpDesigner is the best at least till date. I am really enjoying with it.

I have been developing with Zend Studio v.5.5.1 for over a few years now. I have gotten spoiled by its feature rich IDE and the Zend debugger with the FF toolbar. With the latest updates to Snow Leopard, I am forced to find a new IDE. I have done all the tricks to get JRE 1.5 and made the needed edits to the ini to increase the memory used and point it to use the proper JRE. There still seem to be issues when I get updates from Apple…

Asides from the latest issues I have had I can honestly say, in my opinion, that Zend Studio v.5.5.1 is one of the best IDEs for working with PHP. I then tried v.6 when it came out and found it to be an eye-sore and a pain to use in comparison to the older version. I am spoiled with using the Zend debugger and the FF add-on. This is actually one of my biggest issues with changing IDEs. I haven’t found one with a debugger as easy to use as Zends with the FF add-on.

Within the past week I have tested out netBeans, Aptana, Zend Studio v.7.1.1. I am not a fan of the PDT environment, but that’s only due to the drastic change from Zend Studio v.5.5.1. After playing with all three for a while I have come to my own conclusion from my experiences thus far.

netBeans – Not my favorite IDE. For some reason a lot of features didn’t work properly. Code assist did not work, the debugger would never initiate, and it seemed to lack many shortcuts that I found useful in Zend Studio v.5.5.1. Only allows xdebug… I’m not a fan. Although I will be releasing a tutorial on installing xdebug on MAMP since there doesn’t seem to be any decent ones out, at least not that I found.

Aptana – At first, this was going to be my new IDE. It allows for use of the Zend debugger or xdebug. I finally got the entire IDE setup with my projects and was using it for a little while but found that the debugger was more difficult than I am accustomed to. There was no FF toolbar or add-on to help with debugging form submissions and so fourth, this may be due to my lack of experience with the IDE but I was not able to find anything on the matter. If someone knows of the add-on or toolbar, please let me know. My only issue with this IDE was that I could not get the debugger to work as it has always worked for me in Zend Studio v.5.5.1. Since the debugger is essential for me, I dropped this IDE as well.

Zend Studio v.7.1.1 – Knowing that the debugger will work as it always has, this one has a plus from the beginning. I actually like this version better the v.6 so I was getting excited a bit. After setting up my multiple projects the IDE started to show it’s weakness. One of my projects, a fairly large project as I am duct-tape programming an older system, seemed to kill Zend. The IDE crashed constantly and I had to force quit the IDE a few times because it froze up. I am constantly getting java head space errors, even after tripling the values… The IDE is great for light and small systems but on larger projects it get a big F. It’s taken two days so far and the process is still not done, I am currently around 60% of DLTK indexing… This is a waste of my resources and it will not stop, even when I tell it to stop… There are many issues with the IDE. The only thing that seems to be a plus for this IDE is the debugger. Which is one of my biggest concerns…

Zend Studio v.5.5.1 – Once I made the necessary edits to get the IDE to function properly on Snow Leopard, this IDE is still better than any I have tried, although a major drawback is no support for PHP 5.3… Currently I am using this as my IDE again until I find an equivalent IDE. Since the majority of my projects run in PHP 5.2 this isn’t a dire issue but in the next six months this may be more severe.

I don’t believe I am too picky but I guess I may need to lessen my strictness on an acceptable IDE. Like I said before, it is essential that I have a FF tool to be able to trigger the debugger. I do not want to have to manually enter data into the debugger for form posts, since this is where I do the majority of my debugging. The bare minimum for an acceptable IDE is: Zend debugger (although xdebug would be acceptable too) with FF tool of some sort for debugging, code assist and completion, code analyzer, and profile. These are all that I really need. The rest is just candy, and too much candy make you fat, as Zend Studio v.7.1.1 has proven to me.

To help allow some to understand this a little more, I am using a Mac Pro with 2 2.8GHz Quad-core intel Xeons and I have 10GB of 800MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM. It’s not the best but it’s more than capable of handling these IDEs…

These are my opinions on the different IDEs I have tried. I joined today just because of this topic so I look forward to seeing what other have to say. There seems to be a lot of talent in here so I look to the feedback. I believe I stated everything of importance, as I am pressed for time currently but I wanted to give my insight.

Exactly, I use Komodo Edit, too. It’s a great software.

Netbeans :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart:

Code Completion in NetBeans PHP requires that you open the file to populate the feature. This works fine for new projects, but obviously not for old ones.

ZF Debug support I believe is either already in the pipeline, or scheduled to be added to the next point release. Don’t quote me on the last part, though.

TopStyle is pretty decent too for PHP development. I use it since Homesite is dead.

I started out using PHPEdit way back then when I started working for this one company they made it required everyone use the same IDE, so we all used Eclipse and I have been using it since. Dont know if I want to change because Im so familiar with Eclipse, plus I really like the features as Im diving into java and android development.