I’ve been using PHPEclipse for PHP development for 9 months or so and finding it a real time saver. Sadly it seems that further development has stalled, possibly because of Zend’s announcement in late 2005 that they too would build their own Eclipse plugin.
That has finally borne some fruit with the recent release of a reasonably functional version of Zend PDT, or PHP Development Tool.
Snappy name.
Still, even though a final release isn’t slated until september, this version isn’t too shabby and appears to have a comparable feature set to PHPEclipse already. I haven’t tried the debugger yet, but editing features seem good, with folding of comment blocks and methods, help with PHPDoc tags, nice class inspector pane and reasonable parsing of php code for problems (it doesn’t seem to spot as many problems as PHPEclipse, but maybe I’ve missed a setting somewhere).
So far, it’s shaping up to be pretty good IDE, particularly if you are already using Eclipse. Remote debugging of PHP, in combination with Subclipse SVN plugin and the Web Tools Platform plugin, gives you a pretty capable development environment.
Methinks I’ll be switching permanently soon!
Thanks, man. I have been using Eclipse PDT – it works fine, but could do better. I will give the Zend PDT a try.
You’ll find they are one and the same, Zend PDT is a misnomer on my part. PDT is an Eclipse project, but Zend has joined the Eclipse Foundation and as far as I can tell, it’s being developed by Zend staff. I think you knew that already though 🙂
Weird, I was installing this exact package a couple of days ago, after deciding that if I wanted to build anything other than a few small pages, I’d need some sort of IDE.
How does Zend’s ‘Zend Studio for Eclipse’ product (http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/) integrate/relate to Eclipse’s PDT project?