Zend IDE Review - Functionality (
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The What's What
The Zend IDE and Debugger combination provide a basic IDE functionality set,
nothing fancy, it has the basics, including syntax highlighting, html autocompletion,
auto-indentation, and a few other frills found in most modern text editors. Without
the debugger itself the IDE is really just a sub-standard text editor with PHP
bindings.
However, don't get me wrong, as I said earlier, there is more to the picture.
Where the IDE does come through is in its integration with the Debugger. While
the Zend IDE on its own is nothing more than a text editor, when you integrate
it with the Zend Debugger, it becomes a valuable tool. Once integrated with the
debugger the IDE then provides the ability to use debugging features such as setting
watches and breakpoints in your PHP code, which is simply not possible with any
other editor (yet).
Missing Features
While the Zend IDE does support a basic feature set, it still misses some features
that are very important in order for it to move from a good IDE to an excellent
IDE. To start off with I'd personally like to see both CVS and FTP integration
built-in with the IDE. The PHP Manual should be integrated with the IDE (ie, built-in
quickref, when you have problems with a function or function-usage just hit
), its also missing other nice features such as custom macros, function auto-completion/syntax
definitions, gui component viewing, gui page designer, etc.
Ease of use
With some IDE's learning to use the IDE is a process within itself (case-in-point:
emacs). Luckily that isn't the case with the Zend IDE. The interfaces to the Zend
IDE are quite simple, and if you cant figure out something by looking at it (and
fooling around a bit), then you can always look through the distributed documentation
(however, because the ide is simple it doesn't have nearly the power of a more
complex ide such as emacs or KDevelop).
Other IDE's?
The Zend IDE is not the only option, currently there are quite a few editors
out there that are available for free or at a low cost, here I'll give the skinny
on how the Zend IDE compares with these other IDE's.
PHPEd
The PHPEd,
http://www.soysal.com/PHPEd/ is a very nice (windows-only) IDE. It includes advanced debugging features,
ftp integration, code completion, code templates and a built-in webserver for
debugging. It still is a work in development however, and it did have a few unseemly
crashes. Regardless, If you're soley developing on a windows platform this is
the product that I'd use.
UltraEdit
UltraEdit,
http://www.ultraedit.com, is an advanced editor for the windows platform. Its pretty much the editor
I'd use when developing with the windows platform. However, its not PHP specific
(although with a little tweaking, it can be an excellent editor). It doesn't have
the Zend IDE's ease of use or the integrated debugging features, but if you want
a good editor for the windows platform, UltraEdit is it (the Zend IDE with Debugger
is better for PHP coding, but for anything else, UltraEdit is excellent, its one
of the only thing I miss about Windows).
Emacs
Where do I start? Emacs is the ultimate editor (at the risk of starting a holy
war), with some tweaking and a little bit of work it can be an impressive PHP
development environment. However, the power that emacs provides also has a downside,
learning to use emacs and work with it at a level that makes things easy is probably
harder than learning PHP itself. So, if your happy using emacs, I don't suggest
switching, but in general, emacs does not make a good PHP IDE, simply because
the learning curve is so large.
Nedit
Nedit,
http://www.nedit.org, is an excellent X-based text editor for the Linux environment. It provides
much of the power a program such as (although emacs is definetly better, in the
authors humble opinion) emacs provides with an easy to use frontend.
Conclusion
While the Zend IDE leaves much to be desired as far as its feature set is concerned,
if you are looking for a cross-platform IDE, with debugging capabilities its currently
the only way to go. Overall the IDE has much promise, and I hope that as time
goes on, some of the features that I require get added so I can stop hacking my
PHP scripts in emacs.
