Jeroens blog

About a year back I decided I had to change my development environment from working on a remote server with a simple text editor to something more solid, if I wanted to do serious PHP development.

I went for Eclipse as IDE, which is without a doubt the most awesome IDE out there, as it’s completely open source, robust, and has a lot of extensions that make it usable for an awful lot of languages. For PHP there is the open source PHP Development Tools Project, and the commercial Eclipse based IDE build on top of this, Zend Studio. At that point having my development environment as mobile as possible was rather important, as I often occupied machines other then my laptop or my own desktop. Therefore I put both Eclipse and my server on an usb.

Now, a year later, a lot has changed, and I finally updated my tools accordingly. First of all, I’m now also using Linux, and plan to leave Windows into the dust bin soon, so prefer tools that work on both operating systems. Secondly, I now only develop on my laptop and own desktop machine, so portability is not as important any more. Also, I’m now doing a lot more serious PHP development as I was doing a year ago, and would benefit a lot from more decent debugging, testing and profiling tools.

What I did was throwing out my mobile web server and install Zend Studio, together with Zend Server Community Edition (which is free). They integrate in such a way that you can do code tracing, work with breakpoints, profile code, ect, all out of the box. If you are developing PHP applications like me and in search for a good tool, I can definitely recommend this. Zend Studio isn’t free, but it’s worth the price. Not going into a complete list of awesome stuff PDT and Zend Studio include, but this blog post, although a little dates, does a good job at it.

It’ll take me a while to integrate these features into my work-flow, as I’m not used to having them available, but I expect this to start paying off rather soon then late Also waiting on a new release of Zend Studio build on Eclipse 3.6 (Helios).

(O yeah, can’t write a post about Eclipse without saying: NetBeans fails )

I’ve finally made up my mind about whether I’m going to learn Python or Ruby. I’ve been looking at both for nearly 2 months now, and could not really find a strong reason to use the one or the other. So I’ve simply decided to learn both.

Both Ruby and Python have several good IDE’s. At Arrrr Camp 2009, I got recommended using Aptana RadRails for Ruby (on Rails) development. This IDE is based on Eclipse, so prompted an immediate download For Python, I’ve chosen PyDev, which is a plug-in for Eclipse or Aptana Studio.

I’ve put both IDE’s on my dev usb, and will start messing around with the languages as soon as I got some spare time.

Zend Studio 7.0 is the next generation of our professional-grade PHP application development environment. It has been designed to maximize developer productivity by enabling you to develop and maintain code faster, solve application problems quickly and improve team collaboration. – zend.com

I just noticed, the new Zend Studio, 7.0, has been released 2 days ago! This is great new for me, since ZS is my primary IDE for PHP development. This release uses the latest Eclipse Platform (Galileo), offers better SVN integration and supports PHP 5.3, as well as a whole variety of other awesome features.

After waiting over half a year and having every single beta and RC version on my Google calender, I still managed to miss the release of Eclipse 3.5, named as usual after a moon of Jupiter, this year being Galileo. (No more misspelling Ganymede!!!) Improvements to Eclipse consist of 33 projects, including Mac Cocoa support, domain-specific language modelling, subversion and updates to Equinox.

This Monday Sun released a new version of Netbeans, 6.7. (booooh! I rly don’t like that IDE.) It’ll be interesting to follow the ‘Eclipse 3.5 vs Netbeans 6.7′ discussions in the coming days, to see which IDE gets the upper hand. I’m quite sure though that Eclipse will like always be the more stable, extendible and snappy one. (Highly prejudicial idea’s ftw!)

Update: I’ve just tried out the new Eclipse, and it’s working really well as far as I can tell. It’s slightly faster I think (although it’s possible I’m imagining this). Before I can do some real testing with one of my Java EE projects, I have to add the Cypal Studios plugin that I need for Google Web Toolkit development again. Don’t have the time ATM though.