the heap

A short while ago, I was looking at getting at spending some more time doing PHP development. For the last view years, all my PHP work has been done in vim, which is generally pretty decent. For doing significant work, though, I prefer a more capable IDE.

In the past, I’d used Zend Studio (version 5.x). It was a slow, and a little buggy, but it wasn’t terrible. I’ve also tried Eclipse PDT, the PHP IDE Eclipse subproject. This was all a few years ago, though, so I figured that I’d get a lay of the land, circa 2010.

Zend Studio has changed… it’s based off of Eclipse PDT, which Zend apparently sponsors now, and has some juicy bits that aren’t present in the open source project… profiling, code coverage, etc. You can see a comparison chart here. For a developer that does lots of PHP work, I could see the extra features being worth the $400 price tag. I seriously considered getting a license, since I’d get a discount from having previously purchased older versions. While doing research though, I made a startling discovery regarding licensing. From the Zend Studio FAQ page:

Zend Studio licenses are valid for a single user on a single machine. This means that if you have 2 developers using Zend Studio on the same machine, even if it may be at different times, you legally need two licenses of Zend Studio. If you have one developer and that developer needs to use Zend Studio on two different machines, you also need two licenses of Zend Studio.

Having to buy a license for each machine that I want to use it on is a huge turnoff. Here at home, I have a Windows 7 laptop, Windows 7 desktop and an iMac. Ideally, as long as I’m the only user, I could install a program for my own personal use on all these machines. Better still, I’d really like to be able to install a copy on my machine at work as well, again for my own use. I could live without being able to do that, but not being able to install on all my home machines is pretty much a deal breaker, and it’s a shame, because I find the additional features over Eclipse PDT compelling enough to be willing to lay down the cash for a license.

Continuing my search, I found a decent (though slightly dated) article on Smashing Magazine. The article identifies the main features that they considered important, and then built a comparison chart between a handful of different products. Zend Studio 6 was on the list, along with Eclipse PDT (versions 1 & 2), NetBeans, Aptana, Codelobster and Nusphere. Of these, NetBeans and Aptana PHP were surprising because they offer a lot of features for the low, low price of free.

I’m trying NetBeans out now. The NetBeans guys made a weird versioning change, so rather than the NetBeans 7 that appears in the comparison chart, it ended up being called 6.7, and the current version is 6.8. It’s a relatively small download, starts and runs fast, and it works like a champ. It’s a bit weird that an IDE that I thought more for Java development has such strong support for PHP, but it has all the most important features for me in a PHP IDE… code completion, syntax highlighting, phpDoc recognition (including @property, for identifying properties set through the __get and __set magic methods). Zend Studio may have more features but NetBeans fits the bill for now.