Zend Studio for Eclipse at first sight

In January Zend Studio for Eclipse was released, it combines the Zend Studio technology and the Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools) project. The download is available on zend.com, also the latest Zend Studio Toolbar if needed, you’ll find detailed product information on zend.com.

The last few days I’ve started working with Zend Studio for Eclipse. At first view I didn’t miss anything which I’ve used in Zend Studio 5.5 and the IDE looks very good. Now it’s possible to work on several projects at the same time, that was one thing I really missed in Zend Studio 5.5. First I got some problems to use shortcuts as I was used to, e.g. I didn’t find ‚Go to File‘ (Ctrl+Alt+G) in Eclipse, but with Ctrl+Shift+L I could find the most important ones for me. With the refactoring feature you can now easily rename and move files or elements but refactoring is not working if you use autoload to load files and classes. The Debuger provides all known features from Zend Studio 5.5 but debugging an application is very slow, especially step by step, jumping to breakpoints is better but also too slow that I can’t work effective with it in daily business. I hope for an update to solve these problems. More highlighted features are PHPUnit Testing, Code Coverage, Zend Framework Integration, Zend Platform Integration, Getter/Setter Code Generation, … I didn’t have a look at all of them yet. Overall I think Zend Studio for Eclipse is a great tool to develop PHP applications. With a large amount of plugins, Eclipse provides a platform which gives the possibilty to develop a whole application within one tool, that’s a great benefit.