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 )

                          

Two days I go I got the beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010, which is scheduled to be released in the first half of next year. With it, came .Net Framework 4 beta 2. I’ve taken a good look at the changes in these new versions, and am really excited about the new features included in them.

The new WPF interface of VS is obviously cool, but it includes heaps of improvements, making life for the user easier. I’m still in the process of finding all goodies

The changes in the new .Net Framework are even more exciting. It includes a new parallel programming model, enabling you to create multi threaded applications without having to bother the low level work like locks and thread pools that was required until now. Also new are code contracts, a very handy feature allowing you to specify certain conditions for your code state (see this blog post). On top of that, there are various new features that where lacking in previous versions of the framework, like biginteger support, tuples and complex numbers, as well as multiple others.

                          

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.

                          

While working on Maps and Semantic Maps, I needed to refactor some class names, and tried to use the refactor tool of Zend Studio, the PHP IDE of my choice. The only thing that happened was an error popping up though. After some searching on the web and posting that problem on multiple help forum’s, someone suggested that I should install the latest version of Zend. At that moment I was using Zend Studio version 6.0. After looking at the wiki page about Zend Studio, I decided to download the latest release, 6.1.2, and installed it. I then replaced my old ZS with it, and switched to my GSoC workspace. This went really smooth, I didn’t encounter a single error, and apparently fixed the refactoring problem. Now I also have a bunch of new features available to me that came with this new version. Zend studio 7 is in the making, presumably based on the new Eclipse 3.5, and will undoubtedly contain a whole variety of new features to speed up the development process. One more tool to wait for…

                          

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.