Cinder now available at Mayflower Open Source Labs

Cinder is a plug-in for your eclipse-based IDE (eclipse, Zend Studio, etc.) to display results of your Continuous Integration environment right inside your IDE.

We just released version 0.1.6, which you can install via the Eclipse Update Manager and the URL http://opensource.mayflower.de/cinder, then activating it via "Window -> Show View -> Other -> Cinder".

If you haven’t heard of Cinder yet, here’s a short summary:

You open the XML file containing the errors and warnings of your build (for us that’s typically the PHP_CodeBrowser XML generated by a Hudson build) and get an overview of reports. Now you can sort them, categorize them and work on them in any order. Cinder can grab these files periodically if you make them available via http or on a filesystem.

A few screenshots:

The Cinder View after reading an XML file.

After selecting a warning the file is opened at the matching line.

Bug reports, ideas and feedback are welcome, please visit the github pageto tell us about your ideas.

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.

Performance boost for ZendStudio Windows

According to this blog entry (sorry, German), you may improve Zend Studio’s editor performance by switching off the option „Use OS Look and Feel“ (at Tools > Preferences, tab „Desktop“, option „Use OS Look and Feel“). This also means that ZendStudio uses standard Java PITA look and feel, but nevertheless the UI seems to be a lot faster now, at least on my laptop (try switching between the files with Strg+Tab, or using the file browser etc.).

 

Do you experience the same speed improvements?